by Divina Paredes

How Bay of Plenty District Health Board sped up Active Directory provisioning

News
Jun 13, 20142 mins
Technology Industry

The Bay of Plenty District Health Board was faced with the challenge of a broken in-house scripting solution for user provisioning when it upgraded to Exchange 2010.

This meant new Active Directory Accounts had to be processed manually, which required users and the IT team to go to several systems to get the job done, says Mark Roberts, information technology manager for the DHB.

At various times of the year, the DHB sees a rise in the number of users, making the situation even more difficult. “We have a significant turnover of users, including short-term medical students and locum doctors. So the number of AD accounts needed to be created was very large,” says Roberts.

“In a nutshell, we needed an easy way of creating users.”

The DHB has since then deployed ManageEngine’s ADManager Plus to speed up the process.

We have a significant turnover of users, so the number of AD accounts needed to be created was very large. Mark Roberts, Bay of Plenty District Health Board

Robert says he was aware of ADManager Plus, having evaluated it in a previous role. “The use case we had for it was pretty clear and the costs were relatively small in comparison to the benefit we needed.”

ADManager Plus, he says, could create the accounts “in a flash” whereas in the past it would take staff three to four days.

He says the DHB has saved hours using the software, and also used it for its outsourced after-hours help desk to reset and unlock users.

This, he says, was an “unexpected but welcome side benefit” of the deployment.

The new users also are assured of getting appropriately configured AD account, home drive and email box. “The IT team now spends less time in user creation and more in user support,” he states.

Send news tips and comments to divina_paredes@idg.co.nz

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