Forefront Identity Manager

Register for TEC 2010 – hope to see you there

March 17, 2010

Register using this code to get a discount: ATESENSYNC

http://feeds.feedburner.com/IdentityLifecycleManagerilmBestPractices

FIM Technet Webcasts

March 9, 2010

The FIM product group has some great webcasts coming up on technet

Forefront Identity Manager 2010 has RTM’ed

This first webinar is using many of the slides that I created as part of our engagement to write the FIM 2010 Technical Overview Whitepaper (due out soon). Anyhow it makes me feel cool.

3/9/2010 6 PM Pacific time- TechNet Webcast: Forefront Identity Manager 2010: Technical Overview and Deployment (Level 300)

Today, March 2, at the RSA conference Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing of Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM, formerly codenamed ILM “2”) with General Availability starting next month.

Download the eval here:

Microsoft® Forefront™ Identity Manager 2010 Evaluation Version

Yeah!

FIM gives us capabilities for User provisioning (and deprovisioning), Group management, Self-Service Password Reset, Password Synchronization, Workflows with Approvals, User profile self-service management, and accomplishing these items through Declarative Provisioning. Yet FIM retains an incredible set of extensibility points, allows customization of the Portal, schema of the objects, managing new systems, custom workflows, custom clients to the FIM web service.

Final Update for FIM RC1 released

February 1, 2010

On Friday the product group released Update 3 for Forefront Identity Manager 2010 RC1 available through connect

https://connect.microsoft.com/site433/Downloads

Major changes as part of Update 3 (my regurgitation and comments from the release notes):

Fewer trips to the FIM Service event log – since the FIM MA export errors will now show up in the Synchronization Service Manager! Hallelujah!
Less need for custom old style code
- Now more than 1 MA can be authoritative for deleting an object (resource)
- New functions for Sync Rules (Declarative Provisioning) – I guess I will have to update my function cheatsheet
  - Null – not certain what they mean by this – null out the value or let another sync rule provide the value.
  - ReplaceString
New type of MPR – Set Transition MPRs vs. request based MPRs
- Run on Policy Update only applies to this type
- All other MPRs are – request based MPRs
- This should easy some of the difficulty in wrapping heads around MPRs.
DBA’s will love these:
- Backups without stopping the FIM Service and now supported!
- SQL Failover Clusters are now supported! (I don’t know if this means that clustering the Synchronization Service is supported)
Prereqs have changed
- Server Components
  - Windows Installer 4.5 is required,
- FIM Service requires SQL 2008 SP 1
- The addin for Outlook now needs Outlook 2007 SP 2

Even the certificate management side got some improvements: Windows Server 2008 R2

FIM Hand on Labs

February 1, 2010

More Hands on Labs for Forefront Identity Manager will be coming up (similar to the one I did in Irvine, CA) – Phoenix April 7th and 8th and then Dallas sometime in May.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/IdentityLifecycleManagerilmBestPractices

FIM RCDC explained in brief

November 29, 2009

In this post I attempt to give you the reader a quick overview of how the FIM RCDC works conceptually. As for the mechanics of modifying the RCDC the nearly complete but growing collection of documents downloadable from MSFT will suffice.

As you will recall FIM is the new abbreviation for ILM, since it has been renamed Forefront Identity Manager, and RCDC is the Resource Control Display Configuration formerly known as the Object Visualization Configuration (OVC). RCDC is the way you custom how FIM displays objects (now called resources) in the portal. Now for English: If you need to change the options and information users see in the FIM portal when they create new users, groups (security or distribution), or edit or view these resources you do it by modifying the RCDC. The RCDC is an XML object, and each resource type (user, group, request, etc) has three: Create, Edit and View. To get a handle on the terms take a look at the figure below:

Answering my FIM RC 1 question

November 24, 2009

Thanks to Darryl Russi for answering my questions in my earlier post An Update to FIM RC1 where I was asked about something I had read in the release notes:

Some of those items raise a few questions, like how to setup a FIM service that only takes requests from the sync service? Do we setup multiple FIM Service instances and then configure the FIM MA to talk to one of them, and not make that one available to web clients?

Identity Synchronization FIM 2010 HOL Irvine California

November 23, 2009

I will be at the Microsoft Technical Center in Irvine on Dec 1 and 2 presenting this HOL with Marvin Tansley of Gemalto.

Identity Synchronization – Hands on Training

Date: December 1-2, 2009

Location: 3 Park Plaza, Suite 1800 Irvine, CA 92614 949-263-3000

Microsoft, Gemalto and Ensynch invite you to a free 2-day training seminar and hands-on-lab on Microsoft’s Forefront Lifecycle Manager (FIM 2010).

Come and learn how FIM 2010 can help you by delivering simplicity, agility and efficiency while increasing security and compliance within your enterprise identity infrastructure.

FIM RC 1 is here – what’s new?

October 4, 2009

FIM RC 1 is here. Microsoft released it on Sept 30th which is the end of Q3 of 2009 which means the ILM/FIM team at Microsoft met their stated deadline announced back in March.

Here is the download:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/cc872861.aspx

What’s new:

Gil Kirkpatrick has a nice post about the differences in the data structure:

Auditing FIM 2010 RC1

Darryl Russi a Sr. Test Lead at Microsoft has started blogging about FIM RC 1 performance: