Challenge Overview
Welcome to the Account Management Tool Idea Generation Contest. As part of this contest, we are looking for a suitable Account Management Tool for our client.
Project Overview
Our client helps individuals, teams and organizations to accelerate innovation. They have a web application that serves as a platform for individuals to grow in their personal development, for teams to build their collective capabilities and for organizations to drive large scale cultural change.
This project centers around the client’s web based application where we intend to enhance its design and architecture.
Challenge Overview
This is an Idea Generation Challenge. Review will be carried out by our client and winners will be decided at their discretion.
We had earlier launched a Specification Challenge where we created the specification for an Account Management Tool for our client. We would like you to build upon this specification and recommend any Account Management Tool for our client that meets the specification created.
In particular, our ideal Account Management Tool will meet the following criteria:
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It shall have a well-designed API. It should support the data types our client is looking for out-of-the-box OR allow our client to build their own and model the relationships between them.
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All information stored in this system is sensitive, so input of or access to information via the API shall be made only over secure channels and only with a secret credential (password or token). Credentials should be easily revokable if they get compromised.
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It shall have an easily explainable and scriptable data import story. It could support idempotent synchronization operations from separate heterogenous data sources (SQL db, flat files).
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It should have a cloud solution that requires minimal IT management on our side. Fulfilling this requirements is critical.
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It could support common technology standards designed for such problems, such as LDAP. The account management tool shall expose an API that our client’s internal team will use to provision users. The ultimate desire here is to use already-existing, mature software libraries in order that our internal team is able to enable user synchronization between different data sources.
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It could work with existing systems or standards that support industry-standard single sign-on technologies such as SAML. Our client anticipate researching and implementing a SSO layer in their platform so they can plug into different user directories of new and existing enterprise clients.
Your solution must include tools that:
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Are open source
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If it require a license or subscription, that’s okay
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Off premise (running on an off site VM like AWS EC2)
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PaaS / SaaS
We will share the specification for the Account Management Tool in the contest forum which is visible only after registration. The specification describes the features and expectations from the Account Management tool that you need to consider when proposing your suggestions for an existing tool.
As mentioned the review will be carried out by our client. Participants should analyze multiple high-value options given our specification, and provide a single recommendation among a few other options that didn't quite make the cut.
Reviews should be mostly objective, but subjective feedback could really help us figure out how to be creative in using existing solutions in solving our problem.
Our client’s challenge right now is decreasing the time to provision their user accounts, while allowing them to be flexible in creating groups and roles for those users to be in. They need that flexibility because they can't afford to set these groups and roles in stone right now because of their evolving domain model.
Over time, their challenge will evolve into a data synchronization problem, as they'll need tools to help them map users, potentially from different user directories, to the groups and roles in their domain.
Creative, flexible solutions that take into account that our client is its nascent stage in this journey and evolving constantly will ultimately win out.
Final Submission Guidelines
No code submission or video submission required for this contest. You are expected to submit a Word / PDF document with a detailed description of different Account Management tools that our client could make use of and how they meet our client’s expectations. Your submission can contain one single solution or more than one solution too. In case of proposing multiple solutions, make sure that you provide a table that compares the major features sets against the requirements in the specification.