Welcome to Adaxes. In this video we’ll be looking at customization
options in the Web Interface. A good user interface must be clear and simple. It should allow users to see and do only what they need and nothing more than that, which is especially important when it comes to delegation of management tasks. To achieve that Adaxes enables you to extensively
customize the Web Interface and give out different configurations to different users according
to their tasks and responsibilities. Adaxes provides three built-in Web Interfaces:
a fully-functional Web Interface for Administrators, Web Interface for Help Desk which is much
simpler and more straightforward, and the third one is the Web Interface for self-service. You can customize practically anything in
the built-in configurations, and in addition to what comes out of the box, you can also
create any number of your own custom Web Interfaces. So, let’s start from creating a new Web
Interface in Adaxes. This is a very simple process that requires
just a few mouse clicks. I simply need to give a name to the new Web
Interface, and select the configuration to copy the initial settings from. And that’s it! I’ve created a Web Interface and if I go
to the Common Sign In page, as you can see it has appeared in the list of my Web Interfaces
and is ready to use. Instead of allowing users to select for themselves
which Web Interface to use, Adaxes can automatically redirect them to the Web Interface you want
them to use based on certain rules. For example, if a user is in the Administrators
group, redirect them to the Web Interface for Admins, if the Job Title contains the
word ‘Support’, redirect them to the Web Interface for Help Desk. This way you can give out one URL to all users,
and Adaxes will provide them with the right Web Interface automatically. So, this is my new Web Interface and currently
it looks exactly the same as the Web Interface for administrators, because all the settings
have been copied from it. Currently the Home page displays information
that can be useful for admins, like objects that have been created and deleted recently, groups and computers I’m an owner of, many different charts, and things like that. And absolutely everything here can be customized. Let's switch to the Web Interface Configurator
and change the Home page contents. This is the configuration of my new Web Interface,
and what I'm going to do now is hide what’s currently displayed on the home page and add
these two items that I have preconfigured here – ‘Members of my managed groups’
and ‘Inactive computers’. Then I'm going to add the ‘My Account’
card on the Home page and disable all the charts there. Now I need to save the changes, and if I go
and refresh the Web Interface, as you can see, the Home page has changed. Now it displays members of all the groups
I manage, a list of inactive computers in all my domains, and I now also have quick access to my own account directly from the Home page. If I go back to the configuration of the Web
Interface and disable all these items and cards, the Home page will look totally different. It has become much simpler and now the main thing here is the actions, which are also fully customizable. This is the configuration of those actions. So, let’s get rid of the User Management
group and add a new one, let’s call it ‘My Group’. And now I can add my own actions to the new
group. As you can see, I’ve got a whole bunch of
options I can choose from. Let’s select the ‘Add to Group’ action and leave all the parameters by default without any changes. And let’s save the configuration again and
switch to the Web Interface. Here is the action I’ve created. And when I click on it, the first step is to select the new members I want to add to a group. You can control exactly which objects are
available in this list. For instance, you may want it to contain only the subordinates of the currently logged in user. And then I need to select to which group I
want to add the users I’ve selected. The list of groups is also customizable. For example, you may want only the distribution
groups that contain the word ‘Department’ in their names to be displayed here, and thus
disallow adding objects to other groups. And in addition to that you can also customize
the forms and views that users interact with in the Web Interface, and granularly configure
the execution process of absolutely any operation you delegate to users. Let’s suppose we want to delegate user account
creation to non-technical users who don't even know what Active Directory is. It is important to streamline the operation
as much as possible for such users and get rid of anything that may confuse or mislead
them. Here is how the user creation process looks
by default in the Web Interface. First I need to select the Organizational
Unit where I’d like to create a new user, which means that I need to understand the
OU structure to be able to select the correct location during this step. And this is how the user creation form looks
by default. As you can see it contains a lot of information
that may be too technical or complicated for a non tech savvy user. So, let's see how we can simplify that. This is the configuration of the ‘Create
user’ action, and if I don’t want users to be able to select the Organizational Unit
to create a new account in, I can simply specify the default container, and then select the
‘Always use this container’ option. When selected, new user accounts will always
be created in the predefined OU and the first step of the wizard will disappear. And instead of allowing users to select the
OU manually, you can configure Adaxes to automatically move user accounts between OUs based on certain
rules. And here I can customize the user creation
form. Let’s make it as simple as possible. I’m going to delete all the sections except
for the ‘General’ one. And here I’m going to leave only the First
Name and Last Name fields. And let’s add one more field to this form,
for example Office. Then I need to save the changes and refresh
the Web Interface. And now when I click ‘Create user’, as
you can see, the user experience has changed. Now I don’t need to select where to create
a new user, and the user creation form is really simple. And note that I can select a value for the
Office field from a drop-down list, and the field contains a custom hint text and a help pop-up, which is done using Property Patterns in Adaxes. In addition to the standard fields that are
stored in Active Directory, you can also add your own custom ones in the forms and views
in the Web Interface. For example, I can add a checkbox to the user
creation form and then, based on whether it is checked, Adaxes could add the new user
to a group in Active Directory or, let’s say, assign a specific Office 365 license to the user, which can be done with the help of Business Rules. So, let’s go ahead and create a new user account in Active Directory with the help of this custom form. This is the account I’ve just created, and
as you can see here, data stored in Active Directory, like general account information,
account options, logon hours, membership in groups, along with Exchange mailbox properties
and Office 365 account information, is all presented in a single view. And this view is also 100% customizable. So, let's take a look at the configuration
of the view. I can be very granular about what is displayed
there, like which fields are visible, I can rearrange them into sections the way I want, determine which sections are editable and other things like that. Let’s simplify the view and leave just a
couple of sections, like General and Exchange Properties. From the General section I’m going to remove everything but the Description and Office fields. And I want to configure the Exchange Properties
section to display only Mailbox Usage settings and a couple of mailbox features, for example
Retention Hold and Archiving. Once it is setup, let’s save the configuration
and switch to the Web Interface to see how the view looks after my modifications. As you can see, the view is now significantly
simplified and contains only what I want to be visible in my Web Interface. And this way I can also customize how other object types, like groups, computers or Organizational Units are displayed here. The list of operations available on this view
can also be customized. For example, if I don’t want the Delete
operation to be available here because I want the Deprovision custom command to be used instead, I can easily remove it from this view. As you can see here, I can disable any operation on specific object views or for specific Web Interface components, and if I need to, I can completely turn it off in the entire Web Interface. And if I do it, the Delete operation will
not be available in the Web Interface, so I can’t delete the user even if I have the
permissions to do it. Another great feature of Adaxes Web Interface
is that it changes dynamically according to the permissions of the user who is logged
in. Meaning that if the user isn’t allowed to
for example, reset passwords in Active Directory, the reset password operation won’t be available
for the user in the Web Interface. And similarly to operations, the Web Interface
won’t display any Active Directory objects that the user isn’t allowed to see. For example, now I’m logged in as an admin and I can see all the different objects in the Web Interface, like users, groups, computers, contacts and others. But if another user logs in to this very Web
Interface, some of the objects will not be shown here for this particular user. And in addition to this, you can determine exactly which objects to display in a specific Web Interface. For example, if I don’t want computer accounts
to be displayed there, I can simply uncheck the computer object type, and all computers
will disappear straight away. And you can go even further and configure
the Web Interface to display only objects that match certain criteria. This way you can show only enabled user accounts
and hide disabled and expired ones, or show only the groups that contain the word ‘Staff’
in their names. And on top of all that, you can limit users
to view only objects located in a particular Organizational Unit or domain and hide the rest of the AD structure from them. Like for example, I may want my Web Interface
to enable users to browse Active Directory starting from the ‘Offices’ Organizational
Unit. And I can also disallow using Business Units
for browsing objects in AD. And now if I go to the Web Interface, as you
can see, in the object path here I can see only the part that is allowed in the Web Interface,
and in the Browse menu I can’t view objects outside of the ‘Offices’ Organizational Unit. Alternatively, instead of selecting a specific
OU as the top level node, I could configure the Web Interface to allow users to view let’s say, only what’s located in their own Organizational Unit or domain, which is especially useful
for multi-tenant AD environments. For example, if I enter here a template like
this, it’ll be replaced with the path of the Organizational Unit where the account
of the logged in user is located, and this way users will be able to see only the objects
located in their own OU and everything outside of it will be hidden. And you can make many more different adjustments
to polish the user interface, like you can customize which columns are shown by default
in object lists, which columns users can add themselves, how objects are sorted and grouped,
what’s displayed in the mouse-over popups, which account and password statuses to show
and many other things of that kind. You can even disable entire components of
the Web Interface. For example, if you know that the Web Interface
won’t be used to perform operations on objects in bulk, you can disable the Basket component, and everything related to it will disappear from the Web Interface. You can also restrict or completely disable
features like search, reports, browsing, favorites, customize what’s available in menus, toolbars
and many other things like that. This level of customization enables you to
present end users with only the functionality they need, without any unnecessary features
and visual noise in the user interface. And to integrate Adaxes seamlessly into your
environment you can enable SAML-based single sign-on, which will allow users to sign in
with the same authentication mechanisms that you use within the rest of your organization. To match your corporate identity, you can
change the way the Web Interface looks, like you can set your own color scheme, company
logo, the icon for the web browser, as well as change any text in the Web Interface and
even add your own translations to any language. All that creates a better user experience,
and enables you to delegate different management tasks to users, even to those who don’t have any technical skills. With Adaxes they won’t even know that they’re
working with Active Directory. Thanks for watching.