I have a situation which I have a hunch is fairly common in the business world, but which I'm finding a challenge to incorporate into my SharePoint Farm.
We host multiple clients on host named site collections, each with their own URL, Content DB and their own Nintex DB.
We don't currently use search since we are on a single wfe and a single app server and don't want to tax our setup just yet, although if a case could be made for using search to solve this problem then I could convince management to invest in another wfe.
So I hope thats enough context, now the conundrum:
Each company has their own OU in AD and we use these groups to manage permissions in both SharePoint and in our backend financial application which uses web services to communicate back and forth with our SharePoint. An invoice comes in for a company, a
task is created for approval based on some business rules and eventually the task is approved and mark completed both in SP and in the backend accounting system.
The whole purpose for having SP is to provide a means for external clients to approve workflow tasks.
We have created views, 'My Active Tasks' which filters on tasks assigned to [Me] and 'Active Tasks', which are grouped by User. Tasks are assigned to AD groups.
But this doesn't really match the clients business model. Our customers would like Store Managers to see only tasks for their stores, District Managers to only see Tasks from their stores, and Regional Managers to only see tasks from their stores!
Additionally, they would like some users to only see tasks that are from certain vendors. But we are assigning tasks to these AD groups.
I don't see this being possible in AD as there are simply too many permutations to make it manageable. Since we are assigning to AD groups everyone in that group gets a task. What the client would like is that only the person in that Store would get a task
and that the Regional Mgr and District Mgr would only see the stores/tasks relevant to them!
I'm not 100% certain of this but, I don't think that AD has enough fields to keep this information with the User's profile or that they could be leveraged to solve the task assignment issue. We would likely have to use a description type field and put
a comma delimited string of Store IDs that a particular manager is responsible for and it could get messy quickly not to mention the trouble of keeping it all up to date.
We also have this information in another datastore (not AD) but we aren't sure how to leverage this to meet our needs of assigning or limiting visibility to items in SP.
Has anyone else had to solve this kind of problem and if so how in the world how did you manage it?
Thank you
Love them all...regardless. - Buddha