Adventures in identity management
Good monitoring and alerting is an essential, but often under-loved, part of any computing infrastructure. The complexities and multiple dependencies of even a straight-forward MIIS installation make systematic monitoring absolutely essential. Server Health Obviously you will be monitoring that the server itself is actually up. I believe something a little more than a ping is…
MiisApp was designed to be a toolset for non-administrative users who needed to interact with MIIS in certain, well-specified ways. Some of these tasks do not directly involve MIIS itself, but are for setting up the data appropriately – such as the forms for viewing source data. An issue that came up from time to…
To try and decrease my code maintenance on MiisApp I introduced a number of dynamic menus that were built at application startup, and then refreshed periodically. Now I don’t want to go into all the code specifics here. I am not a software developer, and the code I wrote for this application was very site-specific. However…
A big priority in cobbling together a client application for MIIS was to provide evidence that MIIS was in business. If people could watch MIIS in action they would, by degrees, start to feel more comfortable with it – in what order it did things; how long a typical cycle takes; and just general warm-fuzzies…
I think it’s fair to say that the majority of problems encountered in an IdM installation are to do with data. Data that’s wrong, data that’s missing, data that includes illegal characters or 17 tabs at the end – the possibilities for bad data really are endless. One of the messages I found myself attempting…
One of my complaints about MIIS has always been the lack of a client application that can be run on a workstation. In any organisation large enough to need (and afford) MIIS there are going to be multiple people who need to interact with it. They may not be scheduling syncs, but they could well…
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…
Once you get the hang of Extensible MAs a whole world of possibilities opens up. If you’re trying to achieve something that is related to Identity in some way, and it’s scriptable, then you can do it with an XMA. One such example I came across, in a university environment, was personal websites. Certain users…
Some tasks seem like they should be difficult to implement, but are in fact beautifully simple; while others tangle you up in complications for no apparently good reason. In my MIIS experience I’ve had far more trouble than seems right with Description fields. What I’m talking about here are the types of free-text comment fields…
This method has now been updated for Exchange 2007. Yesterday I posted about archiving home directories by zipping them with an extensible MA, and today I’m going to write about doing something similar with Exchange mailboxes. Exchange mailboxes are most usefully archived to PST files, and the only way I found to automate it was…