Scheduled task: Send e-mail once if the "accountExpires"-property changes

Question

How do we set up an e-mail notification (only once per user) as an scheduled task (ex. every hour) based on the property "accountExpires"?

Some background: Our HR-software automatically synchronises an end date to our AD-users on the value "accountExpires". We want to be able to set up an e-mail that generates a ticket in our ticketing system for offboarding-purposes based on this change in value, but the e-mail should only be created once. If not, the ticketing system will receive and create multiple tickets on the same user every time the schedule runs.

If scheduled tasks is not the best way to achive this result, do you have any suggestions on how to solve it another way?

Answer 1

Hello,

Do we understand correctly that the email should be sent on the expiration date? If that is correct, you can use a scheduled task like the following:

Comments

Hi there,

No, the creation of the e-mail has to be generated if the field changes from an empty value to populated one so that we can follow up internal offboarding-processes before the user quits, ergo before the defined date.

This field on our user accounts in AD are empty up until they deliver their resignations in the HR-software, only then this field is populated with a date.

The date itself is not relevant in this use case, it's only relevant in the sense that it's our deadline for completing every offboarding-steps internally.

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Hello,

Thank you for specifying. As the updates are made omitting Adaxes, the only option is to preserve the current expiration dates and then use a comparison in the scheduled task. For the preservation, you can use any of Adaxes custom date attributes (e.g. CustomAttribtueDate1). Finally, you should have something like below.

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Hi again and thanks for your quick reply,

Will this ensure that we will not receive another e-mail for the same user the next time the scheduled tasks runs?

We only want one e-mail per user if the value is populated.

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Hello,

Yes, that is exactly it. Every time the Account Expires property changes, a single email will be sent.

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Hi again,

We have now tried setting up a solution based on your suggestion, but it doesn't seem to trigger an e-mail. The only thing we can see in the logs is the following:

Operation	Initiator	Completion Time
Modify USER2, TEST (Domain\Users): clear CustomAttributeDate10	TEST: Schedule Tasks	20.01.2025 13:55:25

The scheduled task is configured like this:

FYI: We have changed the "Property Display Names" of "accountExpires" to "End Date", and we have used the attribute "CustomAttribute10" instead of "CustomAttribute1" due to it being used someplace else in our setup.

Do you have any other solutions on to how to resolve this issue, or do you think there's anything in our setup that prohibits this to work based on the information provided earlier in the post? We have several "Business Rules" that triggers e-mail notifications (set up just like this one) that still works.

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Hello,

First of all, you should never set scheduled tasks to run every minute. It is very resource consuming and will never actually work as the next run of a scheduled task is counted from the end of the previous one. In your case running once an hour or even once a day should be just fine.

The setup of your scheduled task is correct. As long as CustomAttribtueDate10 is cleared, the Send email notification action is also executed. How exactly do you check that it is not? Did you check the general log? Are you sure that the email address in the action is valid?

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Hi again, and sorry for my late reply...

The reasoning for setting the task to run once every minute, was purely for testing purposes. We have also tried running it once every hour, but this did not change our outcome. The emails never showed up.

Yes, we based our findings on the general log. From there we could see that the "CustomAttributeDate10"-field was cleared, but there was no records (via general log) of emails being sent based on the previous action. All of our email-settings (including recipients) were copied from another working action.

Is there a script that perhaps may be more reliable in doing what we originally set out to to? That is; to trigger an email once the "accountExpires"-field in AD goes from no value to some value.

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Hello,

Is there a script that perhaps may be more reliable in doing what we originally set out to to? That is; to trigger an email once the "accountExpires"-field in AD goes from no value to some value.

Unfortunately, there is nothing like that.

Yes, we based our findings on the general log

For troubleshooting purposes, please, send us (support@adaxes.com) a copy of the Adaxes Event Log in EVTX format. For information on how to view the log, have a look at the following help article: https://www.adaxes.com/help/ServiceEventLog.