Tutorial: Configure Blinq for automatic user provisioning

Article
03/16/2023
5 minutes to read

This tutorial describes the steps you need to do in both Blinq and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to configure automatic user provisioning. When configured, Azure AD automatically provisions and de-provisions users and groups to Blinq using the Azure AD 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 Azure Active Directory.

Capabilities supported

Create users in Blinq.
Remove users in Blinq when they do not require access anymore.
Keep user attributes synchronized between Azure AD and Blinq.

Prerequisites

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

An Azure AD tenant
A user account in Azure AD with permission to configure provisioning (for example, Application Administrator, Cloud Application administrator, Application Owner, or Global Administrator).
A user account in Blinq with Admin permission

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 Azure AD and Blinq.

Step 2. Configure Blinq to support provisioning with Azure AD

Navigate to Blinq Admin Console in a separate browser tab.
If you aren't logged in to Blinq you will need to do so.
Click on your workspace in the top left hand corner of the screen and select Settings in the dropdown menu.
Under the Integrations page you should see Team Card Provisioning which contains a URL and Token. You will need to generate the token by clicking Generate. Copy the URL and Token. The URL and the Token are to be inserted into the Tenant URL and Secret Token field in the Azure portal respectively.

Step 3. Add Blinq from the Azure AD application gallery

Add Blinq from the Azure AD application gallery to start managing provisioning to Blinq. If you have previously setup Blinq for SSO, you can use the same application. However it's recommended 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 Azure AD provisioning service allows you to scope who will be provisioned based on assignment to the application and or based on attributes of the user and group. If you choose to scope who will be provisioned to your app based on assignment, you can use the following steps to assign users and groups 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 and groups before rolling out to everyone. When scope for provisioning is set to assigned users and groups, you can control this by assigning one or two users or groups to the app. When scope is set to all users and groups, you can specify an attribute based scoping filter.
If you need additional roles, you can update the application manifest to add new roles.

Step 5. Configure automatic user provisioning to Blinq

This section guides you through the steps to configure the Azure AD provisioning service to create, update, and disable users and groups in Blinq based on user and group assignments in Azure AD.

To configure automatic user provisioning for Blinq in Azure AD:

Sign in to the Azure portal. Select Enterprise Applications, then select All applications.
In the applications list, select Blinq.
Select the Provisioning tab.
Set the Provisioning Mode to Automatic.
In the Admin Credentials section, input your Blinq Tenant URL and Secret Token. Click Test Connection to ensure Azure AD can connect to Blinq. If the connection fails, ensure your Blinq 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.
In the Mappings section, select Synchronize Azure Active Directory Users to Blinq.

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

Attribute	Type	Supported for filtering	Required by Blinq
userName	String	✓	✓
active	Boolean
displayName	String
nickName	String
title	String
preferredLanguage	String
locale	String
timezone	String
name.givenName	String
name.familyName	String
name.formatted	String
name.middleName	String
name.honorificPrefix	String
name.honorificSuffix	String
externalId	String
emails[type eq "work"].value	String
emails[type eq "home"].value	String
emails[type eq "other"].value	String
phoneNumbers[type eq "work"].value	String
phoneNumbers[type eq "mobile"].value	String
phoneNumbers[type eq "fax"].value	String
phoneNumbers[type eq "home"].value	String
phoneNumbers[type eq "other"].value	String
phoneNumbers[type eq "pager"].value	String
addresses[type eq "work"].formatted	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
addresses[type eq "home"].formatted	String
addresses[type eq "home"].streetAddress	String
addresses[type eq "home"].locality	String
addresses[type eq "home"].region	String
addresses[type eq "home"].postalCode	String
addresses[type eq "home"].country	String
addresses[type eq "other"].formatted	String
addresses[type eq "other"].streetAddress	String
addresses[type eq "other"].locality	String
addresses[type eq "other"].region	String
addresses[type eq "other"].postalCode	String
addresses[type eq "other"].country	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:employeeNumber	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:organization	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:division	String
urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:department	String

To configure scoping filters, refer to the following instructions provided in the Scoping filter tutorial.
To enable the Azure AD provisioning service for Blinq, change the Provisioning Status to On in the Settings section.
Define the users and groups that you would like to provision to Blinq 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 and groups defined in Scope in the Settings section. The initial cycle takes longer to complete than next cycles, which occur approximately every 40 minutes as long as the Azure AD 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 will go into quarantine. Learn more about quarantine states here.

Change Logs

05/25/2022 - Schema Discovery feature enabled on this app.
12/22/2022 - The source attribute of addresses[type eq "work"].formatted ha been changed to Join("", [streetAddress], IIF(IsPresent([city]),", ",""), [city], IIF(IsPresent([state]),", ",""), [state], IIF(IsPresent([postalCode])," ",""), [postalCode]) --> addresses[type eq "work"].formatted.

More resources

Next steps

Learn how to review logs and get reports on provisioning activity