Have you ever been asked to deploy software with Altiris (Symantec Management Platform) but only receive a list of user accounts. I guess you did. This is also what happened to me a couple of days ago. As it happened this request was also very urgent. I managed to put together some query which I ran with the sqlcmd directly on the SQL Server. This seemed to me at that point the easiest option. After I was done with the job it crossed my mind that this was maybe much easier to solve with a workflow. So I started to build a workflow and indeed it did not take long and the result is that I have the workflow for later use and I am also able to share this with my colleagues without that they need much of explanation how it works.
Here you see the form where you can upload a list (.txt file) with all the user names.
The workflow reads all the user names and put together the query which will the be run towards you CMDB. And then you get the result like this:
You then have to option with copy paste if there is only a few computers or you can download a report by clicking on the "Download Report" button. The list of computers then can be used to import into a filter for distribution of software or other use.
That the workflow runs in your environment you have to change some settings.
Properties:
Change the name of the SQL Server, Database Name and SQL user name and add the sql users password. In this case i have opted for the sql users because I wanted to have a user with only limited access to the CMDB also having in mind the possibility of SQL injection. That is also why I have built in some additional checks.
I check for example for the length of the user names. As I know they are always the same. So here you might need to change the matching rule to adopt to your environment.
And later on I have one more check where I check for any suspicious "usernames" before I pass on the sql command to the sql server. Again here you might want to add some more keywords to be checked.
That is about it.