This article introduces the new Access Requests – Unified Requester Experience that is currently rolling out as an Early Access feature in Okta Identity Governance (OIG).
The Background
As Okta was building its new Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) product, it acquired a company to provide what would become the Access Requests component of Okta Identity Governance (OIG).
With the early Access Request capability, you built Request Types to be the approval/provisioning flow for any access request. These Request Types were accessed via the Access Request portal (SSO’d to from the Okta Dashboard).
After going GA, Okta looked at improving the Access Requests mechanism to provide a more intuitive and user-friendly way to request access. This resulted in what was called the Resource-centric Access Requests (or RCAR). It comprises Conditions tied to applications and re-usable Sequences that are maintained in Okta but run in the Access Requests engine.
The requester interface for these was hooked directly into the Okta Dashboard.
It also allowed for the older Request Types to be accessed via a More items link.
Customers adopted the new Conditions and Sequences mechanism, but also continued to use the older Requests Types mechanism to address use cases that the Conditions and Sequences could not yet address. But this resulted in two different requester interfaces and confusion.
The Unified Requester Experience
To address this, Okta has released a new Early Access feature called Access Requests – Unified Requester Experience.
This new feature will consolidate all access requests, both Request Types and Conditions and Sequences, into the one UI under the Request Access function in the Dashboard.
Note that the icons for the Request Types are based on the names of the requests and aren’t configurable like the conditions. Also management of the two different types of requests has not changed.
This unified view provides a much better experience for requesters where organisations have a mix of the older Request Types and new Conditions and Sequences.
This is a great step in the right direction! My initial test shows a 23 character limit in the title card which makes for poor user readability on long names. Hopefully that improves before releasing to General Access.