Scheduled notifications from the FIM Portal

I was asked today to implement notification emails on changes to certain groups. Like many situations with the FIM Portal this turned out to be trickier than expected. A number of the groups are criteria-based so don’t actually have a member attribute as such. With no member-update request happening there’s nothing to actually trigger a notification workflow on.

Fortunately the customer was happy to have a daily scheduled email with a summary of changes, rather than immediate emails on every change. So I took inspiration from Bob Bradley’s Housekeeping Policy approach to solve the problem.

ROPU Workflows

The first thing to know about is the “Run on policy update” workflow.

When combined with a “Transition In” MPR this has the very useful effect of re-applying the policy to all members of the Transition In Set upon any change to the MPR. “Any change” includes enabling the MPR, so this is a simple way to force the policy to run against all the objects that are already in the set – effectively re-running any Action workflows, such as a notification.

So all I need to do is get an object in a set, make my ROPU workflow, then just toggle the Disabled switch off and on for the MPR when I want to fire the notification. Easy!

Workflow Configuration

The first thing my workflow does is call the PowerShell activity to gather the information I want to insert into the email. I format it as HTML and then pass it back to the workflow in a WorkflowData parameter.

The Email Template then simply includes the WorkflowData parameter:

 

Transition Set and MPR

Before I can create the MPR I need to create a set. It really doesn’t matter what is in the set in this example as I’m not using any values from the Target in the workflow, however I only want it to have one member so the notification only triggers once. For convenience I have the object receiving the notification as the member. (I expect I could extend this idea to include other objects needing notifications as well, though I’d need some logic matching set-members to their specific notification requirements.)

The MPR is then very simple to set up:

• Type: Transition In
• Disabled: True
• Set: The set I created above
• Action Workflow: The Notification workflow

Toggling the MPR

The final step is a simple little script that enables and then immediately disables the MPR, and which you can schedule as required.

This script uses the FIMPowerShell Function library from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff720152(v=ws.10).aspx
 

PARAM ($MPRName)

# Enables then disables an MPR.
# Used to trigger ROPU workflow.

. E:\scripts\FIMPowerShell.ps1

$Filter = "/ManagementPolicyRule[DisplayName='{0}']" -f $MPRName

$MPRObj = export-fimconfig -CustomConfig $Filter -OnlyBaseResources

$ModifyImportObject = ModifyImportObject -TargetIdentifier $MPRObj.ResourceManagementObject.ObjectIdentifier -ObjectType "ManagementPolicyRule"
SetSingleValue -ImportObject $ModifyImportObject -AttributeName "Disabled" -NewAttributeValue "False"
$ModifyImportObject | Import-FIMConfig

$ModifyImportObject = ModifyImportObject -TargetIdentifier $MPRObj.ResourceManagementObject.ObjectIdentifier -ObjectType "ManagementPolicyRule"
SetSingleValue -ImportObject $ModifyImportObject -AttributeName "Disabled" -NewAttributeValue "True"
$ModifyImportObject | Import-FIMConfig