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Our ERP system contains up to date information regarding the employee hierarchy (who manages who etc).

Our HR Manager wants a distribution list in Exchange that only contains managers. However, our HR Manager wants this synced up with our ERP system so that changes in the ERP system result in immediate changes in the distribution list (or almost immediate. 10 minute or so delay is fine).

Is there a mechanism in Microsoft Exchange to do this? We can expose our employee hierarchy via a website as a CSV, JSON, XLSX, or XML file. Or I'm open to other methods.

mason
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  • Sounds like a job for a script, to me. PowerShell, to the rescue, or something. – HopelessN00b Mar 31 '14 at 20:00
  • So, you're saying I should write a PowerShell script to pull the information from my ERP system? And that I should schedule this script to run at a specified time interval, via Scheduled Task Manager? – mason Mar 31 '14 at 20:01
  • Yeah, I saw `.csv`, and immediately thought of PowerShell. Probably the way I'd go, if I couldn't use the ERP system to keep Ad up to date, and use dynamic groups, per TheCleaner's answer. – HopelessN00b Mar 31 '14 at 20:06

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I've done this in the past and here's what I did:

  1. Create a dynamic distribution list that keys off of them being a manager in AD. How I did this may be different than how you do, but I was able to set it up based on them being in the "manager" field in AD...but I'll explain next...
  2. Update AD using the ERP info. This was done for me pretty rudimentary since our particular ERP system at the time didn't have great APIs/hooks to allow for straight syncing of the data. So for me it was an export from the ERP database into a .csv file. Then I had a script that ran nightly (in your case I guess every 10 minutes) that updated AD with the latest "Organization tab" attributes in AD like manager, title, dept, Company (we used it for location), etc. It did this based on keying off of their employee ID # in AD, which we key in for each new employee via the Helpdesk.

The nice thing is when you look in AD or at a particular user's info in Outlook you can see both their "Direct Reports" and who their "Manager" is.

And of course the dynamic distribution list itself checks to see who is and isn't a manager in AD.

NOW, as far as "GIMME THE CODEZ", that's a different story. I'd be happy to help, but I no longer work at that company and it is their intellectual property, not mine.

If you can look at direct syncing hooks/api's between AD and your particular ERP system, that's where I would go first. If not, the export > massage data > import into AD like we did works well enough on a schedule.

TheCleaner
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  • Thanks, this seems like a reasonable solution. Don't worry, you won't find me saying "GIMME THE CODEZ" as I'm pretty comfortable handling that part. I was hoping for a more "built in" or "standard practice" method of doing it rather than rolling your own code, but I guess I'm out of luck in that regard. – mason Mar 31 '14 at 20:44
  • Yeah, built-in would be up to the ERP OEM. Check with them for sure, they might have hooks of their own for syncing the employee info, a lot of them do. The big thing to take away from this is that Exchange is secondary...get the AD/ERP sync setup and the distro list will be the easy part. – TheCleaner Mar 31 '14 at 20:48