This is Part 3 of Web Active Directory’s blog post series highlighting our new PowerShell-enabled platform. We introduced the series with an exam of how other software vendors approach provisioning with costly implementation services and then looked at WebAD’s PeopleProvision solution more closely.

In this post, we look at how easy it is to implement PeopleProvision to help delegate and automate the Active Directory and Exchange mailbox provisioning processes. The final post in our series shows how leveraging PowerShell for easy customization and extensibility allows you to easily model your business logic using a well-known, proven technology platform.

Implementation services can generate a lot of dollars for software companies and many software vendors rely on these services as a key revenue stream. Since companies earn revenue from implementation services, the companies are incented to maximize the money they earn while implementing their software products and the cost for implementation often goes sky high, even approaching the cost of the software itself.

Web Active Directory takes a different approach to implementation services. Throughout our history, we’ve focused on producing useful software that installs quickly and easily without requiring implementation services. Now that we’ve crossed the road into provisioning with the PeopleProvision solution, we plan to preserve the goal of emphasizing software usage over implementation services. PeopleProvision takes less than 30 minutes to install and just an hour or two to configure (after pre-requisites are installed, of course) and we help you with this process.

Better yet, the out-of-the-box PeopleProvision functionality—AD account creation, Exchange mailbox creation, home share creation and mapping, address and organizational AD attribute data population—enables many organizations to get up and running merely by creating a few provisioning rules. Your organization can have a fully-functional AD/Exchange provisioning implementation running in only a few hours!

We do see more complex scenarios where organizations require custom business rules processing when creating new AD accounts and Exchange mailboxes. In these cases, we work with you to analyze your needs and provide a full scope of work before moving forward. This means you know exactly what we’re going to do and how much it will cost so you can decide how to proceed. No long, costly implementation engagements for weeks at a time…just a simple, straightforward bid for only the work you need to get up and running for your custom needs.

Best of all, you can do all your customizations yourself with no implementation services from WebAD since we provide the PowerShell script source code to you. This allows your organization to leverage its PowerShell expertise and save some cash along the way.

We present the final post in our blog series tomorrow where we’ll check out how PowerShell empowers PeopleProvision to go way beyond out-of-the-box provisioning and really energize your organization’s provisioning processes.