Workflow Soluiton

Our setup is 4 domains where the SD and Workflow live in one domain and the users live in the other three.  I'm creating a HW request form using the ServiceCatalog.Request.Template where the approval needs to automatically look up the users manager and send them the task to approve/deny.  I really don't even know where to start with this.  Any suggestions to where I should look for examples or even giving me an example would be awesome.

There are ActiveDirectory components available in workflow where you can query a user's details from AD, including his/her manager. Once you have the manager name, you can get the manager's email via AD or ProcessManager components (assuming your ProcessManager is syncing with AD).

And once you have the manager email, you can use this for email assignments in your Workflow components.

Thanks, I've looked at these and understand what your stating, I'm really a novice at this still so I was hoping there was an example out there that I could learn from.

reecardo's reply covers the bases on this one.  phoward and I webexed and bit and created a model to handle lookups/domain evaluations and assignments, and all should be well.  

I am not sure what method africo and you developed to accomplish what you were looking for, but (hopefully) as an alternate or for future reference what you can do to ping the manager for the approve/deny task is this-

create a new dialogue. click the Event Configuration tab then click the elipses next to Start Process.

in this model you want to message the manager, and within this message drop the ResponsePageLink component onto your message. when the manager clicks this link, it will bring them to the dialogue start, which you can then build your form accordingly. hope this helps.

I have created something simaller for the company i work for, We have 3 soon to be 4 domains. One where all hardware lives and the other for users.

Any of our PO Requests need to be approved by the budget holder who may be diffrent from user requesting so the workflow i have created links into our AD and picks up the user manager if one is set or lets them search for there manager, who then recives the request and needs to approve.

PO Feeder Form (WebForm)

PO Process (WorkFlow)

I really appreciate everyone's responses.  I went about it a little different.  I created a new application's property inside the Process Manager to include all the service account and domain info for the seperate domains.  I did this so that anyone with admin rights can go in and change security info or domain info if that were to ever change so that the specific project didnt have to be opened.  I then added this to the project.  I created a new integration library to be able to map this info for a specific user's domain and it works very well.  There's not much to it either.  The only issue I've run into is that the different domain's AD is not correct, so I've had to set it up so the user has to search for their respective manager in the end.  Sigh.