Introduction

The HelloID Self Service module, also known as Service Automation, provides organizations with the ability to empower their end users and ease the IT workload. Service Automation is broken up into two major areas: Self Service Products and Delegated Forms. This article will clarify the functionality and use cases of these areas.

Self Service Products

Self Service Products are used to facilitate requests for apps, shares, and software. However, you can enable your organization's users to request any number of resources. Authorized users can event request physical items such as the company presentation laptop, a replacement phone, or even to reorder business cards and office supplies—all with the click of a button.

Product and resource owners can, in turn, keep track of which users are active and which licenses, apps, shares, etc. they have in use. Changes are handled and registered uniformly without ever bogging down the helpdesk.

Self Service Products are made up of five sub components: Categories, Products, Approval Workflows, Forms, and Users, each of which will be covered in brief below.

Categories

Categories are a grouping of products, typically all of a similar type or targeted toward a similar audience. For example, you may have a category for all of your accounting software, or a category for all of your file shares to which users may request access. Learn more about categories here.

Products

All requestable items in Self Service are referred to as "Products". Products are configured by the HelloID administrator and owned by end users within your organization, typically managers or resource owners. Authorized users are then able to request access to those products, and their request is either approved or denied by the product owner or another responsible party (see Approval Workflows below). Learn more about products here.

Approval Workflows

Whenever a product is requested, HelloID triggers an approval workflow. Approval workflows are a customizable set of steps that a request must go through in order to be approved or denied. The default workflow, for example, routes product requests to the product owner. You may also create your own workflows that route requests to any number of users within your organization, such as the end user's direct manager. Learn more about approval workflows here.

Forms

Sometimes a simple request is not enough—you need more information from the end user. To get this information, a form may be associated with a Self Service product. When that product is requested, the end user must fill out the form. The data from that form can be used later on in the request process. Learn more about forms here.

Users

End Users

See: How to enable Self Service for end users.

Any authenticated user may request a Self Service Product to which they have access. Access is granted not only at the product level, but at the category level as well. Available products may be viewed and requested on the HelloID User Dashboard by going to the Self service products section. Learn more about requesting products here.

Managers

See: How to enable Self Service for managers.

Managers have the ability to view their employees' Self Service products, as well as request and return products on their behalf.

Product Owners

See: How to enable Self Service for product owners.

Each product is owned by a person within your organization. By default, this person is responsible for approving or denying the requests for access to their product. Incoming requests are displayed on the HelloID User Dashboard under Inbox. With the proper permissions, product owners can also request access to their products on behalf of other users.

Delegated Forms

Delegated Forms allow organizations to empower authorized users to perform complex or administrative tasks, while at the same time hiding complexity and minimizing the amount of permissions that are given out.

For example, an end user can be given the responsibility of enabling or disabling other user's accounts. Without Delegated Forms, that user would need administrative rights to any system they needed to perform this action in. With Delegated Forms, however, they don't need access to those systems at all--they can simply fill out the form, and HelloID does the rest.

Any Delegated Form that a user has access to will be available to them on their HelloID Dashboard underneath the Servicedesk heading.

Delegated Forms are made up of two major sub components: Forms and Tasks.

Forms

Forms are the method by which users interact with HelloID's Delegated Forms functionality. Several types of forms are built-in to HelloID, but administrators can build any kind of form that they can think of with a robust library of form components. Learn more about forms here.

Many form components can be connected to Data Sources, which can be static information housed in HelloID, or information retrieved from an external source such as an API.

Information submitted through a form is then passed along to a Task, where it can be used to do any number of things.

Tasks

Tasks are what make things happen once a form is submitted. Submitted form data is available within the task as a variable. Learn more about variables here.

HelloID comes with many built-in tasks to choose from, but administrators can build their own using custom PowerShell scripts. This extensibility makes HelloID Tasks and Delegated Forms an extremely powerful tool for any organization.