Use-case 26: What Accounts Work Best For Contract Employees In Your Active Directory
To begin with, let's bring out some differences between your regular employees and your contract employees.
1. Regular employees do not come with an end-of-contract date, whereas contract employee do.
2. Regular employees would require an account on the domain to provide access over resources, whereas contract employees may not.
3. Regular employees would require a dedicated mailbox to send, receive and store emails that are exchanged within the organization, whereas an external mailbox would suffice for contract employees.
Now that we have a few ground rules on the contract employees, what AD account might be appropriate for contract employees?
Active Directory mail-enabled objects are users and contacts to which emails can be sent to communicate. Their email repository, i.e., their mailbox is not available within the organization.
Mail-enabled users are Active Directory users who can login to the domain and be provided access resources like file servers, documents, etc.
Mail-enabled contacts are Active Directory objects that do not have any access on the domain. They can neither login nor access AD resources by any means. Contacts can receive emails on their mailbox outside the organization.
Depending on your requirement, you can provision accounts for contract employees through ADManager Plus which gives you the upper hand of provisioning users accounts and their mail accounts simultaneously.
