One of the most repetitive and resource-intensive operational tasks for IT teams is managing users, groups, and roles. This process is almost always triggered by HR following an organizational change. HR submits a service request ticket to IT for each individual operation.

If we analyze this workflow, it’s clear that it is highly inefficient: it requires asynchronous coordination between two teams, HR and IT. Conceptually, HR could interact directly with Microsoft Active Directory, the most common platform for managing users, groups, and roles. In practice, however, this rarely happens. The reason is obvious: Microsoft Active Directory is the backbone of the company, it is complex, and no one outside IT wants to deal with it.

The proposed solution is to create a natural language interface that allows HR to interact with Active Directory in a simple and secure way by:

• Creating a new user when someone joins the company
• Assigning and modifying groups and roles for existing users
• Disabling users when someone leaves the organization
• Searching and retrieving information about users and groups

Installing n8n

n8n can be installed either as a Docker container or via npx. In this example, we use:

This provides access to the n8n web interface at http://localhost:5678/. The first step is to register the initial account:

During registration, you can optionally provide a valid email to receive a free license that unlocks some premium features.

At this point, n8n is installed and operational, although this setup is suitable for development purposes, not for production environments.

Workflow Overview

We aim to create a workflow that allows an operator, via a natural language agent (bot), to:

• Retrieve a list of users
• Get details of a specific user
• Search for a user
• Create a user and assign a role (standard, staff, admin)
• Disable a user
• Activate a user

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