Just because we didn’t participate in Earth Hour, didn’t mean that our Power company, Salt River Project (SRP) needed to turn off power to the whole neighborhood last night and again this morning ;) I am all for using our resources wisely. But sometimes I rebel against the symbolic gestures. I mean if the power company needs an hour off can’t they just schedule downtime like we do with computer systems?
Joe Zamora the maintainer of the Ensynch ILM 2 Custom Workflow Walkthrough is our main presenter at our next Webinar this Thursday at 9 AM Pacific. To register click on the image below. The code from our Pre-con workshop is posted on CodePlex Ensynch Custom WF Activities http://feeds.feedburner.com/IdentityLifecycleManagerilmBestPractices
As I endeavored to install the ILM 2 Portal into a SharePoint farm (WSS 3.0 SP 1) with a remote database I encountered the following problem: The dreaded Premature Failure during installation. When I turned on logging for the install and examined the file, I found: Action 14:55:25: ConfigPortalAnonymousAccess. CAQuietExec: CAQuietExec: This operation can be performed only on a computer that is joined to a server farm by users who have permissions in SQL Server to read from the configuration database.
In case you haven’t heard Zoomit VIA or rather Microsoft MetaDirectory Services has been renamed yet again, from Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 to Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 to Forefront Identity Manager 2010 or FIM for short. For obvious reasons the L was dropped when the F was added (Forefront + ILM = FILM). So ILM 2 => FIM 2010 (stole this graphic from Brad Turner’s blog – his Smart Art creations are beautiful – recently I have been studying smart art under his tutelage I hope to soon approach his level of skill)
In the last four months two very talented people have joined Ensynch, Chris Calderon, ILM MVP, and Mark Struck. Chris Calderon of IdentityJunkie.com fame is extremely talented with ILM, AD Federated Services (AD FS) and many other tools. Mark Struck, is a very talented developer, and experienced implementer of ILM. Even before Mark joined the team he and I collaborated to figure out how to use the ILM 2 web services.
I have been involved with the Microsoft Live@edu (formerly Windows Live@edu) and the Outlook Live (formerly Exchange Labs) programs for quite sometime. What a wonderful opportunity for schools to alleviate the cost of hosting email for students and then to be able to offer it to alumni helping provide them with lifelong connection to the university and way to keep their email address from their student days. Maintaining stronger ties leads to more evangelism on the school’s behalf and will lead to more Alumni donations.
Marvin Tansley of Gemalto demonstrated their add-on to ILM 2 for provisioning One Time Password (OTP) devices using ILM 2, with the goal of minimizing the # of portals that users visit in order to perform self service management. It looks really good, it even accounts for lost device management. Gil Kirkpatrick of Quest interviewed me on camera to discuss my experiences at the conference. That was fun. At lunch Gil handed out prizes (we provided a red colored XBox – I guess the red had something to do with Resident Evil).
Marc Mac Donnell has just launched his blog on http://assurancesinidentity.blogspot.com/ and called it Assurances in Identity, and has posted the links to the CLM API documentation and case study about some work he did with MCS UK and CapGemini. I look forward to many more posts from Mark about some of the wizardry and trick in managing certificates and identities. http://feeds.feedburner.com/IdentityLifecycleManagerilmBestPractices
TEC 2009 continues onto the last day. Joel Silver spoke on his efforts and plans to implement ILM 2 for Microsoft. He presented a very interesting workflow to show how he addressed the challenge of creating unique email aliases. Then I listened to Felix as he discussed some of the interesting aspects of LDAP enhancements from around the vendorscape (I think I just made that word up). http://feeds.feedburner.com/IdentityLifecycleManagerilmBestPractices
Now that our pre-conference workshop on Taming the Chaos – Building a Practical Lifecycle Mgt. Application in the ILM “2” Portal is done and our (Brad, Chris and me) sessions done: Proper Care & Feeding of ILM, CLM and RMS , Designing an Object Expiration & Reconciliation process in ILM 2 , Rescue Your Identity Metasystem from Chaos (reporting against ILM 2), and ADFS Extensibility, we are all able to relax a little and enjoy everyone else’s sessions.
