ManageEngine enhances identity and access management portfolio

Advanced Hybrid Environment Management
New capabilities have been added to ADManager Plus, ManageEngine’s Active Directory management solution, which help organisations that use on-premise Active Directory and cloud-based applications.

Automated Google Apps Provisioning: When administrators create users’ Active Directory accounts using ADManager Plus, it automatically provisions those accounts with Google Apps user accounts as well. This eliminates the inconsistencies and delays usually associated with a decoupled provisioning system in multi-directory environments, especially when the directory sync fails. Further, this automation provides organisations ample opportunity to safely hand over user onboarding processes to HR and other non-IT staff members.

Office 365 Reports: To help administrators manage their Office 365 tenants and licenses effectively, ADManager Plus offers information that was previously available only via PowerShell scripting. Now, information about available security and distribution groups, proxy addresses of those groups, and last directory synchronisation time is readily available in ADManager Plus reports. License usage details are presented in a unified view and format, which provides administrators a clear idea of how to manage the licenses or service assignment.

Assisted Self-Service In Line with Organisational Policies and ITSM Objectives
When rapid resolution of IT issues becomes imperative, organisations begin contemplating end-user self-service, but not many go beyond implementing self-service password management. Other factors that contribute to help desk workload – such as directory update requests or mail group subscriptions – are not delegated to end-users owing to certain organizational policies. Enhancements to ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus, an IT self-service solution, can help in this regard.
The enhanced ADSelfService Plus can integrate with ADManager Plus’s business workflow engine, which presents organisations using both these tools an opportunity to offer assisted self-service to end-users in situations where complete self-service is impossible or does not conform to organisational policies. In such cases, an organisation can now route a user’s request generated in ADSelfService Plus, say updates to phone number and address, to appropriate manager configured as an approver in the ADManager Plus business workflow. Once the designated manager approves, the change is updated in the directory automatically.

Integration between IT Self-Service and Help Desk Management Solutions
ManageEngine also announced that ADSelfService Plus is now capable of integrating with its ITIL-ready service desk solution, ServiceDesk Plus. This integration enables end-users of ADSelfService Plus to quickly access ServiceDesk Plus and create trouble tickets whenever they encounter a problem for which self-service is not available or feasible.

Furthermore, a partnership has been announced between ManageEngine and Spiceworks, a network management freeware, wherein the self-service password management capabilities of ADSelfService Plus are now made available to SpiceWorks users.

True Continuous Active Directory Monitoring and Real-time Change Notifications
New capabilities added to ADAudit Plus, ManageEngine’s Active Directory and file server auditing solution, continuously monitor Active Directory and report on changes taking place in it. Additionally, AD admins are provided options to configure the application to detect changes that they consider harmful and alert about them in real time; alerts are emailed to selected recipients as soon as a specified change is detected.

Such continuous monitoring and real-time information about the state of Active Directory objects offer IT administrator the insight to understand or foresee the potential security risks, take preemptive actions in time, and thus improve the security posture of an organisation's Active Directory setup.