ERP Data to Active Directory
The ERP I work with is called Vision and is created by Deltek. This holds all the data for all departments in the company, including employee data. Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft’s repository of usernames and passwords that can access a network. But AD stores information about the employees which is then used for display in Outlook and Lync: Such as phone, mobile, address, title, name, supervisor, and so on. Having this information accurate is critical. Rather than creating some kind of procedure or policy to govern it, I created code.
I could create a custom workflow DLL using Vision’s API. The catch was, at the time, I had to go back to Visual Studio 2003 to do this, per the requirements of Vision. No problem: Microsoft will send me a copy and I can learn it quick. Using C# .NET, I was able to read the active employee list from Vision, impersonate a network administrator, query AD using LDAP, and match Vision employees to AD objects. Then it was a simple matter of determining what AD called the fields in code and just mapping in the appropriate data from Vision. (more…)
