Smart to Intelligent AD Group Management

By Naveed Qazi

Last night, I was on my way back to my home when I heard something strange. Someone was crying from the back of my car.

Stop…Stop..!, the voice went loader.

I stopped the car. Who is this? My eyes were scanning the darkness.

“I’m a group owner”; I heard the voice of a lady again, coming from somewhere.

What can I do for you Miss Owner? I was about to yell. (My eyes stopped pursuing  the darkness)

I need help; I’m tired of trying many directory management products but still suffering. Need something intelligent to look-after my needs. Can you do something for me?

Yes, off course I have an intelligent product for you named “GroupID”.

I have 100,000 groups in my organization, what can your GroupID do for me to look-after this clutter?

You can create smart groups with GroupID and then you will not need to look-after these 100,000 groups, instead those smart-groups will manage themselves smartly.

Are you kidding? You mean I should create another 100,000 smartgroups to replace this clutter. That would need another life of me.

Hey, No, you can also upgrade existing groups to smart groups.

Really? How?

You just need to go one by one to all these groups, see if they have certain logical makeup, create a smart query with that makeup and you are done.

And what would your product do in all this exhaustive exercise? she raised her eyebrows.

GroupID will provide you smart query designer.

Oh That’s it? Then why did you call it an intelligent product?

Because it is smart.

Yes it looks smart but not intelligent.

How can I make my product intelligent?

You need to read me for that.

Read you?

Yes, If you know me then you know my groups and there you inculcate intelligence in 100,000 groups seamlessly.

Ok, let’s try that. If you look at your 100,000 groups, how do you classify them.

Umm, that’s a tough question, let me see.

I guess I have 4 types of groups in this clutter. She was thinking.

That’s it? I was surprised.

Yes, she was affirmative this time. Let me list down those types and name them.

1. 1. Logical -Complete -Groups
2. 2. Logical- Incomplete- Groups
3. 3. Semi-Logical- Groups
4. 4. Informal- Groups (Illogical Groups)

Can you elaborate a bit?

Sure.

From logical- complete- groups I refer to those groups which have certain logical makeup, a clear membership pattern and 100% complete membership as per the designed pattern.

For example AccountsDepartment, it contains everyone whose department is Accounts.

From logical- incomplete- groups I refer to those groups which have certain logical makeup, a clear membership pattern but they don’t have everyone added in membership as per their design.

For example USOfficeEmployees, it should contain all US employees but this group has not been updated regularly so it doesn’t contain accurate membership.

From Semi-logical-groups I refer to those groups which are inclined to certain pattern for their 60-70% membership but other 30-40% membership is ambiguous.

For example R&D-Group, it contains most of the members from R&D department but it also contains some members from sales and marketing departments to help them validate business needs of their ideas.

From Informal-groups I refer to those groups which have no logical makeup, no membership pattern and are just based on personal choices.

For example MyFriends, it contains all those employees whom I like to be sharing emails and jokes with.

Ok got it. What next?

If you could come up with a product which could do following tasks for me, that might reduce my pain:

1. I need an intelligent directory service to go through my clutter of 100,000 groups and filter out logical complete groups and logical incomplete groups, suggest me a smart query for the same set of membership based on the pattern that it was designed for.

Send me a notification with suggested query and on my approval convert that dumb group to a smart group with that intelligently detected, reverse engineered query.

1. When I choose to upgrade a dumb group to a smart-group, it should try to detect a pattern for logical complete and logical incomplete groups and pop up the query designer with detected/suggested query, I can customize that query further if needed and save it. That will reduce my time to design a query.
2. When I open self service portal it should have membership suggestion box, to give me intelligent suggestions for semi-logical groups.

For example it can say:

“A new engineer has joined QA department, you may want to add him in your Senior-QA-Colleagues list.”

1. For Informal-Groups I don’t want your product to interfere.
2. And …

Can you do these for me?

I was thinking, I tried to peep in the darkness, to see if there were other group owners crying for the same, but it was too dark to let me scan the number, and I was tired by now and wanted to end up this painful dialog. But the pinching voice still disturbs me and the pinch continues!