Automation - How it can improve your life as an administrator?

So the biggest problem I had as an Administrator was keeping up to date with all the requests to change membership in groups as users transferred from department to department. It was critical to keep them up to date as many applications and ACL required the groups to be correct. For example we have an application called Department Calendar. It's used by employee's to request time off as well as keep a centralized calendar of there team members. Well, the problem is when a person left the company or transferred to another department, I was never told. So my applications and ACL's became out of date very quickly.

The Solution! Who has the most accurate employee information in the company? Go to the source - Humans Resources! I realized the the our PeopleSoft database contained all the information about the user I could ever want. Once I convinced them to create a separate SQL table for me, minus pay information, I was able to pull information like Manager, Department, Last Worked Day, Cost Center, etc. With this information I was able to populate information into our database that contains user information. No, not the Names.nsf, I don't touch the design of that. We have a database called the EDBook (Enterprise Directory Book)...OK, it's not the best name, but it works. Anyway, this database contains all the information about the users, which we then use to populate ACL's, groups, pull Cost Center for applications, etc.

Now, when a user switches from Department-A to Department-B, I don't have to do a thing to adjust the groups. An agent that we created runs and re-creates the groups nightly. So, applications like Department Calendar can keep their information up to date because the groups are auto-maintained. Now if a user leaves the company, they are pulled from the ACL's as soon as HR updates the information and the agents run. Now if managers forget to tell me that a person has left the company, no big deal. We also use the process to create distribution groups so we can send messages to specific area of the company.