Dial it Down: Solving real customer problems

One of the great things about working for Sun is being surrounded by truly innovative people, people who are much smarter than me.  It's always amazing to hand off a set of seemingly mundane requirements to engineering, only to have them return to you something brilliant and wonderful.  Such is the case with Identity Connectors.

Rewind for some context... as we all know, any provisioning system must connect in some way with the target resources and applications to which it will provision accounts.  Until the release of 8.1, Sun Identity Manager did this almost exclusively through the use of what we call Resource Adapters.  Given our large install base and the very complex and heterogeneous environments represented by our customers, we naturally have a lot of Resource Adapters (over 60).  However, until 8.1, new Resource Adapters or updates to existing Adapters could only be released with new versions of Identity Manager.  Given the demand for new and updated Resource Adapters from our customers, we needed a better solution.

Fast forward to the release of Sun Identity Manager 8.1... Identity Connectors!  There are two key benefits to Identity Connectors: 1) they can be released and downloaded independently of the core Identity Manager server, and 2) they are open source.  Decoupling Connectors from the core server should give us much more flexibility in terms of releasing support for more resources more frequently.  Open sourcing them helps us tap into the large Identity Manager community for new connector development.  We're already seeing the fruits of this approach, which is a community contributed connector for Google Apps (thanks, Warren!). 

There's one other nifty piece to Identity Connectors... they're not just for Sun Identity Manager!  That's right, any third party application that chooses to interoperate with the Connector Framework can use Identity Connectors as well.  Another beautiful aspect of open source; Daniel Raskin is also talking about it on The Smoking Monkey.

 Learn more about Identity Connectors and the Connector Framework here.