Basic product good, automation product lacking
Rating: 6 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Bettercloud currently and have used it for years to facilitate offboarding and deprovisioning of G-Suite user accounts. We use it to setup auto-replies, and inheritance of the off-boarded user's Google products (Drive, Groups, Calendars) to another user. We do not use it for onboarding: we use an on-prem app to create users and sync that information to G-Suite, Azure, and local AD. That information appears in Bettercloud automatically as it syncs with our domain.
We are trying to use Bettercloud to automate on/offboarding of new hires/terminations, but Betterclouds integration with Workday does not include the ability to create a username/email address in the very common first initial, lastname @ domain.com. This is a very frustrating situation because we want HR to be able to dictate who is and isn't an active user based on their employment status. This means Workday would be the source of truth in terms of "should a user have access to company services/data," while not necessarily being the source of truth for "what does this specific user have access to?" We can handle that with titles from Workday and security groups from Azure. It's kind of ridiculous that the Workday integration can't create a user based on the first initial when the first name string exists. This seems like a simple engineering change to the integration that Bettercloud has little interest in doing. It's also surprising that other clients have no asked for this because it means the clients are doing more work to stick to years-long and firmly established naming convention for hires.
We are trying to use Bettercloud to automate on/offboarding of new hires/terminations, but Betterclouds integration with Workday does not include the ability to create a username/email address in the very common first initial, lastname @ domain.com. This is a very frustrating situation because we want HR to be able to dictate who is and isn't an active user based on their employment status. This means Workday would be the source of truth in terms of "should a user have access to company services/data," while not necessarily being the source of truth for "what does this specific user have access to?" We can handle that with titles from Workday and security groups from Azure. It's kind of ridiculous that the Workday integration can't create a user based on the first initial when the first name string exists. This seems like a simple engineering change to the integration that Bettercloud has little interest in doing. It's also surprising that other clients have no asked for this because it means the clients are doing more work to stick to years-long and firmly established naming convention for hires.
Pros
- Deprovisioning users (auto-replies for terminated users, suspension and reminders for final deletion)
- Handling object ownership (calendars, email delegation, etc.)
Cons
- Automated workflow integrations (more data points should be available, if the API of the service accessed is the limit, then the engineers should be able to modify data pulled from the API in a way the helps the client in Bettercloud's interface)
- Ownership for calendars can be very buggy--inheritance, especially of private calendars that need to be managed by multiple people, does not always go through despite confirmation from the web UI. Sometimes we will have calendars that show a certain user has access, but they do not. Removing that user and re-adding them, occasionally multiple times, has to be done to fix the issue. Though I am unsure if this is an issue with Bettercloud, G-Suite, or a lag time in syncing calendar membership data. That said, the interface for managing such access is much better in Bettercloud than in G-Suite itself.
Likelihood to Recommend
The manual deprovisioning and permissions management Bettercloud provides is really good. The state of workflow automations however is not where it needs to be, particularly if we can't use those workflows to automate user creation using not just our default username/email convention, but one that is very common across most organizations.
Vetted Review
4 years of experience