Feedback Ideas

A proposed enhancement to the product is the introduction of workflows, allowing requests to be reviewed and approved by designated reviewers before proceeding. This would be particularly beneficial in scenarios such as application access requests or provisioning processes, ensuring oversight and compliance. How Workflows Would Improve the Product Approval Mechanism – When a user submits a request (e.g., access to an application or a provisioning action), it enters a workflow where assigned reviewers must approve or reject it before execution. Role-Based Reviewers – Approval requests could be routed to specific individuals based on their roles (e.g., managers, security officers, or compliance teams). Multi-Step Approvals – Workflows could support multi-tiered approvals where different stakeholders must review a request at various stages. Audit and Compliance – Each approval or rejection would be logged, providing a clear audit trail for governance and regulatory requirements. Example Use Case A user requests access to an HR application. Instead of immediate access, the request follows this workflow: Step 1: The user's manager reviews and approves the request.Step 2: If approved, the HR department reviews and grants final approval.Step 3: Upon approval, the provisioning process assigns the necessary permissions automatically. By incorporating workflows, the product enhances security, ensures compliance, and streamlines access management while preventing unauthorized changes.

To protect NIM configuration natively, we should provide the ability to schedule automatically backups. This is beneficial when there are multiple NIM Administrators making configuration changes and often forget to back up their configuration.

When a session is about to expire, there is no way to extend your session. You are simply told to save your work, and then you must log back in after your session expires, regardless of what you are doing. If you are actively working on something, this is rather disruptive. Instead, it would be good to either A.) trigger session expiration only after a period of inactivity, or B.) allow users to click a button to extend their session and continue working.

Currently, you have to export all columns that are turned on in a filter. This prevents you from using ordering on data that you don't want in the export. There should be an option to select which columns that are present in the filter that we want to export in the scheduler's export and multi-export options.

Allow a temporary increase to thresholds in jobs. I have seen several customer NIM environments recently where they had adjusted the job thresholds to allow for the spike in enrollment changes at the beginning of the school year. It was set to really high number and they had forgotten to set it back to a modest number. In one instance, the customer had ALL of their employee's Google groups removed.

Provide the option to attach files to mail templates. Perhaps we can provide the ability to specify an attachment(s) by specifying a path, filter or audit query.

Provide robust reporting solution for NIM so administrators and users are better informed.

This has been asked/requested by a few, so building a feedback item here for further input and research. Why it matters: Some laws and standards (like HIPAA for healthcare or PCI-DSS for payment systems) say you must encrypt personal or sensitive data to keep it safe from hackers or leaks.Encrypting inside NIM: You should be able to choose specific fields in your system tables (like passwords or SSN) and encrypt them using a key that only NIM admin controls. This keeps the data safe even if someone gets access to the database.Encrypting exported data: If you export data from NIM (for reports, backups, or sharing with partners), allow the file to be encrypted using an admin-provided key. That way, the data stays protected even outside the system. Recommendations per industry standards Use secure connections: Always send data over HTTPS with the latest version of TLS (like TLS 1.2 or 1.3). This keeps the data encrypted while it’s traveling.Strong encryption: Use trusted methods like AES-256 (for encrypting data) and RSA (for sharing keys securely). These are widely accepted and hard to break.Protect your keys: Store encryption keys in secure places like a key vault or hardware security module. Rotate them regularly and limit who can access them.Verify the data: Add digital signatures or checksums so the receiving system can confirm the data wasn’t changed or tampered with.Follow the rules: Make sure you’re meeting standards like GDPR (for privacy), NIST (for government systems), or ISO 27001 (for general security). These help you stay compliant and avoid fines

Should have the ability to write to a Google sheet like it does with creating a csv export

Maybe a check-out system or something, but the ability to lock a filter, app, etc. while it's being edited by another admin so that multiple people aren't simultaneously editing the same data. Should also have the ability to display who has it checked out.

I change account data and often need it reflected down through the various systems. A workflow that triggered syncs in sequence to gather updated data from our point of truth and disseminate it down through the various systems would be an incredible time-saver. I.e. runs sync to PowerSchool to gather new data, after that completes, it pushes data to AD, then to Google.

The ability to do an if/else would greatly simplify some processing arcs. Example: All staff gets X group, unless they fit specific parameters, in which case they get Y group. It could be done as part of the role, by adding a "does not meet" option where one role is positive, and if negative is processed differently. The situations we run into are not cut and dried enough to do a full processing filter for both situations, we always wind up with duplicates due to requirements. Our primary reason we have needed this in the past is for our licensing groups for different vendors which do not do the "best offered applied" and instead use a "first applied" model. Right now we are using SQL queries to add a field into our personnel sources.

NIM currently supports only two access levels: FULL or APPS-only. It would be helpful to have an "admin light" security level for junior admins to manage existing source syncs and run existing schedules/jobs when needed, but not be able to make changes to role model, mappings, filters, or what-have-you.

If Roles could be tagged with a Type, then when scheduled, rather than just selecting groupMembership -> target it could be groupMembership ->target to only run the specific tagged roles for that target. This could allow separation of Role concerns (e.g. Students roles not running Employee roles).

It's no fun getting evaluation reports every hour that show zero changes to be made. An option to only send evaluation reports when there are changes to be made in the target systems would be nice.