Designing an Account Unlock Application

In this article we are going to try and provide some ideas for your to reduce those calls to the help desk. In this project we created a help desk portal, this portal pretty much has a main page that you can go to download patches, virus definition files, and manage account unlock information. Calls to the help desk for unlocking locked accounts accounted for a large percentage of calls, so in order to streamline the process we created an application that tied in with the intranet user portal. Part of the application design was adding additional fields to the user preferences table called "pin_number", "question", and "answer". As part of the design of the application, we wanted the user to provide a personal identification number, and answer a challenge question that they previously configured in the application. This article is not going to go into every detail of creating the application, but we will provide the ADSI code and some design ideas for creating your own self-service account unlock application.