Tutorial: Configure BIS for automatic user provisioning

Article
10/23/2023

This tutorial describes the steps you need to perform in both BIS and Microsoft Entra ID to configure automatic user provisioning. When configured, Microsoft Entra ID automatically provisions and de-provisions users to BIS using the Microsoft Entra provisioning service. For important details on what this service does, how it works, and frequently asked questions, see Automate user provisioning and deprovisioning to SaaS applications with Microsoft Entra ID.

Supported capabilities

Create users in BIS.
Remove users in BIS when they do not require access anymore.
Keep user attributes synchronized between Microsoft Entra ID and BIS.
Single sign-on to BIS (recommended).

Prerequisites

The scenario outlined in this tutorial assumes that you already have the following prerequisites:

A Microsoft Entra tenant
A user account in Microsoft Entra ID with permission to configure provisioning (for example, Application Administrator, Cloud Application administrator, Application Owner, or Global Administrator).
An administrator account with BIS.
Country/region should be passed as 2 or 3 letter code and not full name.
Make sure all existing account in BIS has data in sync with Microsoft Entra ID to avoid duplicate account creation (for example, email in Microsoft Entra ID should match with email in BIS).

Step 1: Plan your provisioning deployment

Learn about how the provisioning service works.
Determine who will be in scope for provisioning.
Determine what data to map between Microsoft Entra ID and BIS.

Step 2: Configure BIS to support provisioning with Microsoft Entra ID

To get your credentials for authorization please contact BIS Support or your Account's Manager.

Step 3: Add BIS from the Microsoft Entra application gallery

Add BIS from the Microsoft Entra application gallery to start managing provisioning to BIS. If you have previously setup BIS for SSO you can use the same application. However it's recommended that you create a separate app when testing out the integration initially. Learn more about adding an application from the gallery here.

Step 4: Define who will be in scope for provisioning

The Microsoft Entra provisioning service allows you to scope who will be provisioned based on assignment to the application and or based on attributes of the user. If you choose to scope who will be provisioned to your app based on assignment, you can use the following steps to assign users to the application. If you choose to scope who will be provisioned based solely on attributes of the user or group, you can use a scoping filter as described here.

Start small. Test with a small set of users before rolling out to everyone. When scope for provisioning is set to assigned users, you can control this by assigning one or two users to the app. When scope is set to all users, you can specify an attribute based scoping filter.
If you need more roles, you can update the application manifest to add new roles.

Step 5: Configure automatic user provisioning to BIS

This section guides you through the steps to configure the Microsoft Entra provisioning service to create, update, and disable users in TestApp based on user and/or group assignments in Microsoft Entra ID.

To configure automatic user provisioning for BIS in Microsoft Entra ID:

Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as at least a Cloud Application Administrator.
Browse to Identity > Applications > Enterprise applications
In the applications list, select BIS.
Select the Provisioning tab.
Set the Provisioning Mode to Automatic.
Under the Admin Credentials section, input your BIS Tenant URL as https://www.bistrainer.com/scim and corresponding Secret Token. Click Test Connection to ensure Microsoft Entra ID can connect to BIS. If the connection fails, ensure your BIS account has Admin permissions and try again.
In the Notification Email field, enter the email address of a person or group who should receive the provisioning error notifications and select the Send an email notification when a failure occurs check box.
Select Save.
Under the Mappings section, select Synchronize Microsoft Entra users to BIS.

Review the user attributes that are synchronized from Microsoft Entra ID to BIS in the Attribute-Mapping section. The attributes selected as Matching properties are used to match the user accounts in BIS for update operations. If you choose to change the matching target attribute, you'll need to ensure that the BIS API supports filtering users based on that attribute. Select the Save button to commit any changes.

Attribute	Type	Supported for filtering	Required by BIS
userName	String	✓	✓
active	Boolean		✓
emails[type eq "work"].value	String
name.givenName	String		✓
name.familyName	String		✓
addresses[type eq "work"].streetAddress	String
addresses[type eq "work"].locality	String
addresses[type eq "work"].region	String		✓
addresses[type eq "work"].postalCode	String
addresses[type eq "work"].country	String		✓
phoneNumbers[type eq "work"].value	String
phoneNumbers[type eq "mobile"].value	String
externalId	String
title	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:employeeNumber	String		✓
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:department	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:manager	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:department	String
name.middleName	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:BIS:2.0:User:location	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:BIS:2.0:User:startdate	DateTime
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:BIS:2.0:User:terminationdate	DateTime

To configure scoping filters, refer to the following instructions provided in the Scoping filter tutorial.
To enable the Microsoft Entra provisioning service for BIS, change the Provisioning Status to On in the Settings section.
Define the users that you would like to provision to BIS by choosing the desired values in Scope in the Settings section.
When you're ready to provision, click Save.

This operation starts the initial synchronization cycle of all users defined in Scope in the Settings section. The initial cycle takes longer to perform than subsequent cycles, which occur approximately every 40 minutes as long as the Microsoft Entra provisioning service is running.

Step 6: Monitor your deployment

Once you've configured provisioning, use the following resources to monitor your deployment:

Use the provisioning logs to determine which users have been provisioned successfully or unsuccessfully
Check the progress bar to see the status of the provisioning cycle and how close it's to completion
If the provisioning configuration seems to be in an unhealthy state, the application goes into quarantine. Learn more about quarantine states here.

More resources

Next steps

Learn how to review logs and get reports on provisioning activity