We have a User attribute "Departmental Administrator" (DA) added to "System.User," and we use this in "Request.Request Confirmation" to send a notification to a user's administrative associate so that this person can weigh in on Requests that might require an expense or cause disruption in their department. I have AD import scripts that successfully import our users and assign the appropriate DA from a Default Value by filtering on their AD "Department" attribute.
However, we have a group that's part of a larger department, but they're big enough to have their own DA. Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing in AD that allows me to distinguish between this subgroup and general members of that group. "Department" is identical, and there are no other attributes that say "aha, that's this subgroup" (I thought about "pyhysicalDeliveryOfficewName" but they're not all in the same room or even suite). While I can change their DA manually, this gets overwritten each time the import script runs. And I don't want to not supply a Default Value for this. We have too many End Users to manually add this value.
Any ideas? I *could* stop assigning a Default Value for this attribute, but that means any new End Users (we have a few each year) won't get a DA by default, breaking the above process (at least they'll get stuck with nobody to authorise). I could run a Query that looks for any End User where this attribute is NULL and periodically assign these manually, but that kind of defeats the purpose of automation...
What I really want is a way to not UPDATE this particular attribute upon import, but only use the Default Value if and only if the value is NULL. Kind of the way you can set Window Copy Rules to not overwrite values. Is this possible? Is this an Enhancement Request we can get behind?
Thanks,
Charles