[Freeipa-devel] "Commit comments log" functionality in IPA

[Matthew Booth]

Dmitri Pal wrote:
> Yes I am talking about the situations when a change requires a formal
> process. I was surprised when I faced the reality: big companies
> especially banks do not do any changes until it has been approved,
> scheduled, verified etc. It is a complex process. This is the situation
> when the "commit log" feature is mostly valuable.
> Put it differently it is for the environment where the administrator is
> not allowed to do the changes to the system when and how he thinks
> appropriate but rather has to follow a special procedure.
> There are a lot of such companies.

This is an excellent suggestion, Dmitri. This information can be crucial
to auditors. In general, Windows does this much better than we do, and
the auditors appreciate it.

You make a critical point in the above, which is that the primary
purpose of this feature is to integrate with an existing corporate
change management solution. Given this, it would be quite exceptionally
useful to be able to include site-specific, custom, structured data in
the log, which can be correlated against an existing corporate system.
For example, if a customer uses HP's ServiceDesk, the ServiceDesk
reference number would be invaluable. This will contain the complete log
of change request, to discussion to authorisation. There are a great
many such systems in wide use, so the ability to integrate effectively
with any of them would be a powerful feature.

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat, Global Professional Services

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