Obed Owusu

Microsoft Azure: Onboard Automator

Onboarding Automation Banner

As I gear up for the AZ-104 exam, Azure Active Directory continues to play a major role. So I built a project in Azure to automate the onboarding process of new employees into an organization—handling user creation in Azure AD, assigning roles, and provisioning required Azure resources.

Introduction

In this project, the following Azure services were used:

Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory serves as the core identity service for managing users and permissions. I had an existing tenant, so I configured the necessary groups and roles for automated assignment based on job titles.

Azure Logic App Workflow

I created a Logic App workflow that gets triggered whenever a new entry is added to SharePoint or a specific email/form is submitted. This allows flexible input sources for initiating onboarding. When triggered, the Logic App creates a user in Entra ID using dynamic content from the request. A job title parameter determines which group the user is assigned to.

Logic App Design

Roles, Groups, and Resource Provisioning

Based on the provided job title, the Logic App assigns the user to the appropriate group (e.g., "Sales Users"). I used the Azure AD connector to extract user details and automate group membership. After role and group assignment, I used Azure Resource Manager to provision relevant cloud resources such as VMs, access permissions, and shared folders.

Finally, using Outlook 365, I sent a welcome email to the new user with login instructions and onboarding info. This was handled using the “Send an email” action in Logic Apps, dynamically populated from the input data.

Resource Assignment via Logic App User Creation Logic App Step

Monitoring and Review

To ensure reliability, I monitored the Logic App run history and Azure AD logs to confirm each workflow executed as intended. This allowed me to troubleshoot issues and verify successful onboarding.

Monitoring and Logs

Conclusion

This project was an invaluable hands-on experience that brought my Azure learning to life. It helped bridge the gap between theory and real-world application, especially as I prepare for the AZ-104 certification.

I developed a solid understanding of how to manage user identities and access with Azure Active Directory (Entra ID). Through Logic Apps, I built automation workflows triggered by dynamic events such as SharePoint entries or email form submissions. These flows included creating users in Azure AD, assigning them to relevant roles and groups based on job titles, and provisioning the necessary Azure resources through the Azure Resource Manager connector.

I also incorporated automated welcome emails using Outlook 365 integration, ensuring a complete and personalized onboarding experience. The monitoring capabilities within Logic Apps and Azure AD logs allowed me to validate, track, and troubleshoot the process, adding robustness and scalability to the workflow.

Overall, this project significantly enhanced my skills in:

By eliminating manual onboarding steps and integrating various Azure services, I've built a solution that is not only efficient but also scalable and secure. This automation process can adapt to different business scenarios, department needs, and user roles — making it a strong foundation for enterprise-scale identity and access management.

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