FIM/ILM tricks: 13 months later... FIM 2010 observations and other useful information (maybe)
Hello Everyone!
I have had an interesting time the last 13 months or so. I last posted about trying to create a Fantasy Football engine with ILM "2" and I was trying to get a live feed from a statistics engine to work with. Needless to say, that never worked out. Live statistics services are very expensive. I still want to revisit the concept with fictional data one of these days, however, I have been working with some more practical uses of the product formerly known as ILM "2" and currently known as FIM 2010 (Forefront Identity Manager) and I want to share some of the experiences here.
So in the last 13 months, I have worked with ILM "2" and ILM 2007 and FIM 2010 in various projects and I have been kept very busy. I have seen ILM "2" evolve into FIM 2009 and then 2010 and I am definitely happy with the work the FIM product group has done. They took some extra time getting some things right and I feel the end result will a very solid product.
A few observations:
- The FIM Synchronization Service and Synchronization Manager are nearly identical to the MIIS Service in MIIS 2003/ILM 2007 with some performance improvements. Any previous configuration created in MIIS 2003/ILM 2007 should translate nicely into the FIM Sync Service, including rules extensions.
- The FIM Portal takes a while to get used to, especially if you are not versed in IIS or Sharepoint but the resources available on TechNet definitely make up for someone (like me) who is a specialist in MIIS/ILM making the transition to FIM
- READ THE RELEASE NOTES!! Trust me. Also, while you read the Getting Started pages, don't skip steps.
So also during my time away from the Blogosphere, I got to work on some interesting projects, including the Microsoft Retail Stores, where I created a management agent for Dynamics AX using the Extensible Connectivity Management Agent and the Dynamics AX Business Connector. I will post more details about the Dynamics AX management agent on my MSDN blog soon.
Definitely more to come, hopefully this time it won't be 13 months later.
--Shawn
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.