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Dependencies - not just for avoiding taxes!

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What's our name again?

Whoa, new product name! For those of you who have been chasing butterflies for the past month, what was once known to us as Identity Lifecycle Manager "2" is now called Forefront Identity Manager.  I know, it's not the sexiest name in the world and is probably the 5th different name the product has had since it's conception, but it reflects the combination of Microsoft's security and identity product lines into the Forefront brand announced last year.

Personally, I wanted to name the product "Black Thunder II", but then again there are a myriad of reasons why I am not allowed to name Microsoft products.

 But back onto the topic at hand...

Synchronization Rule Dependency

I decided to take some time off today to briefly talk about Synchronization Rule Dependencies, a powerful yet not well understood part of ILM FIM's synchronization capabilities. In brief, a Synchronization Rule Dependency allows one to construct and apply a series of outbound Synchronization Rules ontop of each other. The scenarios that spring to mind whereupon this functionality is useful are things such as adding/removing Exchange mailbox provisioning, or adding/removing VPN access upon a user's Active Directory account (with the former 2 being dependent on the latter).

If an Outbound Synchronization Rule (the dependent) is marked as having a dependency on another Synchronization Rule (the root), the dependent rule will apply itself ontop of the connector that the root Synchronzation Rule is applied on. At run time, when a FIM Action Workflow attempts to add an Expected Rule Entry (ERE) object for the dependent Synchronization Rule onto a FIM Resource's Expected Rules List (ERL) , there needs to also exist an ERE-Add object for the root Synchronization Rule on the ERL.  (I am just going to take a minute here and say I don't think there has been that many acronyms stuffed into one sentence since the merger between the wrestling giants WWF and WCW was announced). Conversely, if an Action Workflow adds a ERE-Remove entry for a root Synchronization Rule, all EREs that correspond to Synchronization Rules further up the dependency tree will be removed.

Its important to note that when you design an Action Workflow to add or remove a series of EREs that correspond to a Synchronization Rule dependency chain, the root rule must be added to the workflow surface prior to any other dependent rules.

Multiple levels of dependency can be created, with more than one Synchronization Rule being made to depend on a single Synchronization Rule.

In the Synchronization Rule Designer, to create a Synchronization Rule Dependency is relatively straightforward. The first page of the designer allows you to select another outbound Synchronization Rule to make a new Synchronization Rule depend on. When selected, the Scope and Relationship pages are automatically greyed out. Once a Synchronization Rule is made to depend on another rule, the only settings that are adjustable on that rule are the workflow parameters and the outbound attribute flows. Conceptually, this falls cleanly from the fact that a dependent Synchronization Rule is being applied "on top" of another rule.

I wish I could paste some screenshots of what this looks like, but the FIM UI has changed markedly since the RC 0 release and I dont want to ruin the surprise just yet :)

The canonical scenario in which Synchronization Rule Dependency's are used are around creating business processes to manage the provisioning/deprovisioning of capabilities that stem from attributes set on a Active Directory user account. In a typical provisioning scenario, one would construct a base "Active Directory User Synchronization Rule" which, as the name implies, would create a new AD User object, flow the necessary base DN, samAccountName and name information. On top of that, you could then model a dependent Synchronization Rule for granting an Exchange mailbox. This Synchronization Rule would be dependent on the Active Directory User Synchronization Rule, and as a consequence would only have a single flow to the homeMDB attribute. Modelling the user account provisioning seperately from the mailbox provisioning, through the use of Synchronization Rule dependency, allows you to define independent business processes around the lifecycle management of the two through Management Policy Rules and workflow.

 As always, feel free to email me any questions you might have and I will do my best to get back to them.

Bobby

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