Userman, originally thought of plainly and simply as User Manager, was born out of an all-too-frequent conversation at our office:
— Hey, I cannot access the repository/group/hosting/whatever for this project, do you know who is the admin?
— I think Juan/Brian/Nico should be able to grant you access, you just have to hunt them down, make sure to interrupt whatever they are doing, and have them add you to the team in the repository/group/hosting/whatever so you can start working on the project.
Even worse, every time someone left our organisation, we ran into the painful situation of having to go through all of the services we use and manually revoking the former employee’s access — hoping we didn’t forget about any service.
Mind you, as a team composed almost exclusively of software developers who enjoy trying and working with the latest tools available, we usually have more online services in usage than actual people working here. Therefore, in a feat of consistency, we sought for yet another tool that would help us manage our accesses to the multiplicity of tools we were dealing with.
Much to our surprise, we failed to find a product that suited our needs. The few tools that offered user management across multiple online services were clouded by a layer of bureaucracy we were not willing to deal with, and were focused on offering a much-disruptive enterprise SSO to all services, with user provisioning being just an add-on to their platform.
Not willing to abandon the idea, we decided to do what we always do when we need something to solve a problem: we build it.
Fuelled by the constant repetitions of the aforementioned conversations, we embarked in the mission of creating a tool that would help us manage the authorisations of the people here across all the tools we work with.
The guiding principle was to build something as non-disruptive as possible, in which everyone could keep using their existing accounts in their services, with whatever password management systems they felt comfortable with. As such, Userman manages the accesses for defined accounts, replicating the same teams and structures across all services, in a simple and effective way.
Today, while Userman remains under development, we decided to open it to other teams that could be facing the same issues as us, and convert it from an internal tool to an ubiquitous product for medium-sized development companies. If you are interested in being a part of the initial community that will guide the first steps of Userman through their feedback, please do sign up for the private beta and we’ll contact you as soon as we are ready for you to join!
