Creating a new Active Directory account with an InfoPath form

Question

I am setting up a business partner portal in our Sharepoint server. There will be an AD group with permissions limited to viewing and possibly contributing to the specific business partner site and employees of our business partners will have accounts created for them as needed.

Now we would like to let our business development group(BDG) have control over the partner accounts. Ideally they should be able to add and delete accounts and change permissions on them. The BDG are not domain admins so we don't want to give them access to the domain controller. We want to create an Infopath form that will allow them to do all this.

Is it possible to create and manage AD accounts from within an Infopath form on the sharepoint server?

I searched this site and MSDN and can not find anything specifically related to my question.

Answer 1

I know that this is very late, but I accomplish similar functionality for clients without Infopath, but with System Center instead.

System Center Service Manager has a Self-Service Portal where IT staff can list services that they offer (create accounts, provision VMs, raise mail quotas, etc). System Center Orchestrator can capture the data input by the users into the portal and take custom actions, such as creating user accounts. All of this is capable of being integrated into SharePoint.

Answer 2

You may want to move this question to StackOverflow or SharePoint Overflow.

To answer your question, you can do this using a SharePoint Designer workflow and something like the Workflow Power Pack or a more complex Visual Studio Workflow.

Disclaimer, I worked on the Workflow Power Pack so consider me biased :-)

Answer 3

If you have the proper licenses or are willing to try beta software, you could use Microsoft Opalis / Orchestrator beta to monitor a sharepoint list for changes, then perform those changes on AD.

Answer 4

You would have to create application logic in the back end to accomplish this (using C# or whatever .NET or other technology). You can do whatever you like with the data from the Infopath form. But I don't think there's any native functionality to accomplish what you want.

As an alternative, consider Forefront Identity Manager (FIM). This is a product specifically designed for provisioning, but obviously there's a cost attached.

Answer 5

I'm in the middle of updating our open-source tool (http://umanage.codeplex.com) which allows for letting non-privelaged users update and create user accounts in AD. It was meant to allow HR to create new "employees" but you could easily adapt it to meet your needs. It also allows for users to edit their information if its not correct.

We're hoping to roll out the next version in mid September assuming nothing changes.