Dial it Down: Solving real customer problems

It's been a while since my last post, but for good reasons.  We've been very busy visiting customers, gathering and validating requirements for the next major release of Identity Manager.  HOWEVER, before I get ahead of myself, I wanted to share with you news about our most recent release of Identity Manager, 8.1.  Although this is a 'dot' release, it includes two very cool features aimed at helping our customers better manage provisioning to applications in the enterprise.

The first feature provides functionality for External Resource Management.  What's that, you ask?  External Resources are those applications and resources in the enterprise that aren't directly connected to Identity Manager through a resource adapter.  Most large organizations have hundreds, sometimes thousands of internal, proprietary applications.  The simple fact of the matter is Identity Manager will never have a resource adapter for each and every of these applications, but there's still the need to centrally manage access to these applications from a provisioning and auditing perspective.  Identity Manager 8.1 provides out-of-the-box functionality for managing these disconnected resources as well as providing an audit trail when they're provisioned.

The second feature is the introduction of Identity Connectors, a new framework for connecting Identity Manager to target systems and resources.  The primary driver behind Identity Connectors was the desire to decouple resource adapters from the core Identity Manager server so that they could be released independently of Identity Manager.  Now, Connectors can be downloaded independently of Identity Manager builds.  This inaugural release of Identity Connectors includes the Connector Framework and two connectors (AD and SPMLv2), all of which are open source.  That's right, Identity Connectors are a new open source project on dev.java.net (website will be live very soon!).  

Identity Manager 8.1 is available for download here.