Walkthrough: Dynamic group management - Dynasty

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Applies To:

GroupID 8, 9 and 10 – Automate

Dynasty Overview:

A Dynasty is a collection of groups based on each distinct value of the Active Directory attribute, Group By.

A simple example would be a Dynasty with 'Department' as the Group By attribute, which will create a child group for each value of the 'Department' attribute and add members of the respective departments to the groups.

An example of a nested Dynasty would be a Dynasty that is grouped by Country and City. It will create a child group for each country and city value, where all City groups will be nested into their respective Country groups.

Child groups created are regular security groups or distribution lists. GroupID Automate induces intelligence to these groups, so they are dynamically managed and their membership is always up-to-date. Considering the example of grouped by 'Department', when users change their departments, they are removed from the old department group and added to the membership of their new department group. A group will be created for a new department and when a department is closed (with no user belonging to it), its respective group will be deleted (configurable).

Dynasty children inherit the characteristics and properties of their parents, such as group type, group security, expiry policy, owner, delivery restrictions, message size restrictions, and so on. This can save a considerable amount of time otherwise spent in creating groups separately and defining their properties.

Dynasty Templates:

GroupID offers three types of Dynasty templates to help you get started. These are:

Organizational Dynasty: creates a child group for each Company, Department, and Title.
Geographical Dynasty: creates a child group for each Country, State, and City.
Managerial Dynasty: creates a child group for the direct reports of each manager, including subordinates of the manager's direct reports.
Custom: creates a Dynasty by AD attributes of your choice.

The three templates are configurable, whereas the custom Dynasty can fulfill numerous other requirements.

Steps to Create an Organizational Dynasty:

In GroupID Management Console, select Automate > All Groups > right-click Dynasty > New Dynasty.
On the Welcome page of the New Dynasty wizard, click Next.
On the Group Options page, populate the fields including group name, create-in container, group type, scope, and security type.
On the Mail-enable Group page, choose whether the groups will be mail enabled.
On the Owners page, you can specify additional owners for the group. By default, GroupID sets the logged-in user as the primary owner. The primary owner will be inherited by all child groups. You can add additional owners by clicking the Add button. Users, contacts, and even security groups can be set as additional owners.
On the Dynasty Templates page, select the type of Dynasty you want to create. For this article, we will be using the Organizational template.
The Dynasty Options page displays the attributes that would be used to create child groups. You may add or remove attributes here; for example, you can remove Title and add Office here.
On the Query Options page, review the current configuration of your Dynasty. You can click Modify to launch the Query Designer, where you can modify the query to filter the objects for group membership. For example, you may filter out disabled users or get a specific employee type.
Once your query is complete, proceed to the Update Options page. The Dynasty can be updated manually or via a schedule (automated).
The Completion page gives a summary of the selected settings. Click Finish.
If you selected Now for your update options, a parent Dynasty will be created with the name provided on the Group Options page, and child groups will be created according to the configured template.

Note: The Dynasty created in this article is just an example; you can customize the naming template, separator, inheritance, and much more.