This week I joined Okta as Workflows Builder Advocacy Lead.
Okta Workflows is an identity-centric no-code and automation solution. I will be helping build, scale, and help Workflows community be successful. I love the no-code space and I have been writing about no-code on this blog. I also love developer relations and advocacy. When I saw an opportunity to work on no-code in the context of advocacy I jumped on it.
No-code gives people super powers. People can build without needing to ask developers to build it for them and they can build it quickly. Something that would take months before (waiting for developers) now can take days or even hours in some cases. When you can build a solution yourself and fast, that’s an awesome super power.
Okta’s goal is to connect everything, it helps connect users with apps. Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure user authentication into applications.
Okta’s core solution is powerful and will handle many provisioning (and de-provisioning) cases. For example when user is created at an organization, they would be provided with access to specific groups and applications.
But, with a surge of cloud applications (think Slack, Google Workspace, etc.) and remote work, companies need to go beyond out-of-the-box solutions and build custom, flexible and automated flows for granting access, revoking access, transferring user’s files, nudging inactive customers to take action and sending notifications.
Okta Workflows allows to build such flows using a no-code (visual) solution. This means people can build sophisticated flows without dedicated resources to build and maintain any custom code. Think of Okta Workflows as a no-code automation solution on top of Okta’s core offering.
I think another way to look at Workflows, it’s a Zapier-like solution for the identity and access space. For example, let’s say you want to want to read user information from a Google Sheets and create new users in Okta. You could do that with dedicated IT resources, and custom scripts. Someone would need to maintain the scripts and any notifications you want to make, you would need to reach out to IT again.
With Okta Workflows, you don’t need IT resources because you can do it yourself using a no-code visual solution. It’s easy and fast. Here is how a flow looks that would get users from a Google Sheets and create new users in Okta. The flow is scheduled to run periodically.
The automation is built visually, without coding.
Workflows has a large number of connectors available out-of-the-box. You can quickly connect to any of these services in a flow:
If a service you want to use is not listed, you can use a generic API Connector to connect to that service:
I love Okta’s mission to democrotize customer identify and access.
I also love the fact that Okta is an enterprise company and solving real problems and now offers a no-code automation solution to enable a lot more folks to build solutions, and faster. Many no-code companies start by targeting individual builders/creators and only later pivot to enterprise (once they realize it’s hard to make money on the consumer side).
As I learn more about Workflows, I will be sharing tutorials, videos and other education materials. I also would love to partner with other companies to run joint online events. Please reach out if you would like to collaborate!
If you want to start learning about Workflows now, I’d recommend to check out these tutorials.
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