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{ Category Archives } Philosophising

The wisdom of creating new object types and using references

I’ve been busy recently moving myself and family back to our native Australia (though “native” there is a dubious term for my kids who have both lived their entire lives in Europe). We’re in “the Nation’s capital” Canberra now, and very cold it is too (for those northern hemispherarians who seem to think July is [...]

Simplify Complexity

The title of this post is in tribute to LANexpert, where I have been a consultant for the last four years. It’s been a great time but today I bid my LANexpert collegues a fond farewell before moving back home to Australia.
“Simplify Complexity” is LANexpert’s motto and I’ve always loved it. Overly-complex IT systems will [...]

The unfinished furniture store

I was entertained by this comment in Jackson’s summary post about Neil MacDonald’s session at the Gartner Summit :
Gartner’s position is that FIM 2010 is not a complete solution. It can be extended, and by 3rd party partners like Quest but it’s like going to the unfinished furniture store.
It’s not a bad analogy – you do [...]

The need for unique identifiers

Identity management is made a heck of a lot easier if you have a fool-proof way of identifying someone – no wonder governments are so keen on the idea of identity cards. I make no claim either way on the id cards, but I will say that unique identifiers make ILM/MIIS system so much easier to run [...]

Export previews – make it easy for your project sponsors

In the early stage of your ILM project, or whenever taking over some new aspect, It’s worth putting some effort in to drawing a clear picture for whoever has the job of approving your change. What I try to do is produce a spreadsheet that shows, very clearly, the adds and deletes; and in the [...]

Learning ILM

ILM is tricky to learn whichever way you approach it.
If you’re from a sys admin background, like me, then the dawning realisation that you have to code may come as rather a shock.

Should you ever run external processes from extension code?

I had an interesting chat with an ILM collegue the other day, and one of the topics that came up was whether you should ever, under any circumstances, call external processes from extension code.
The prohibition on calling external processes from provisioning (MVExtension) code is clear and well accepted (see the Calling External Processes section on [...]

Disappearance from the CS should not be a justification for object deletion!

I’ve found myself repeating this on MMSUG a couple of times recently, so a post is probably in order. Don’t go deleting everything just because a CS object disappears!
There’s a dangerous little form in the Metaverse Design section of Identity Manager which allows you to set your Object Deletion Rule. By the simple expedient of clicking [...]

Jackson Shaw

Just spent the morning looking at Jackson Shaw’s IdM and AD blog. Jackson once worked at Zoomit, the company that created the original MIIS, before being bought out by Microsoft. He’s now at Quest, who seem to doing some interesting things with IdM, including tools which integrate with MIIS. Perhaps I’ll get to have some hands-on [...]

Some Thoughts on Clearing Delta Tables

When planning delta imports from SQL, thought needs to be given to clearing down the delta tables. If you have any type of code running in response to the imported data then you have to accept that import errors will occur, some of them not even your fault!
What should happen to the rows in [...]