Adventures in identity management
During the installation of MIIS you are shown a list of groups (MIIS_Admins, MIIS_Joiners etc) which will be created. The groups are local groups, and I expect that most people, on their first installation, just accept that. But wouldn’t it be nice if, at that point, a little more explanation, or perhaps some alternative options…
Here’s a really, really useful trick. You can copy the MicrosoftIdentityIntegrationServer database to another server, run miisactivate, and, within no time at all, have an exact replica of your live server. Let me just spell this out – not only will you have all your MAs, your Metaverse fully populated, and your Connector Spaces fully populated;…
A frustrating deficiency of the Identity Manager application is the inability to copy the list of disconnectors from the Joiner page. I really don’t understand why this functionality wasn’t included – was it just an oversight? Ploughing through the disconnectors is an inevitable part of taking over an existing directory, and to do that you’re…
Follwing on from yesterday’s post, where I wrote about hanging on to your import and export logs, I now present a way to view them using an xml stylesheet. The first problem with this approach is that the xml files produced by MIIS don’t work with a stylesheet. The stylesheet name must be included in…
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think there’s a lot of value in keeping days of Run History. Far more useful are the Import and Export logs that you should be dumping from your Run Profiles. Using these files you can track exactly what went in and out, and more importantly, when it happened. This…
Continuing on from this post, let’s say you’ve got a DTS package that is successfully creating Delta tables. You will now want to combine this with your MIIS Delta Import job. Simple Scheduling If your system is not particularly time critical you may be able to get away with very basic scheduling. SQL allows you…
OK now it’s time to get into the scheduling script I wrote for MIIS. At some point I’d like to have a go at rewriting this as a .NET service (addendum: this is now done, see here), but VBScript was where I started, mostly because of the examples in the Developer’s Reference. I’m not going…
Scheduling is a big issue in MIIS and, when new to it, it seems rather odd that there is no native scheduling within the basic application. I expect most people quickly find out about MASequencer from the MIIS Resource Toolkit, and this isn’t a bad starting point. With MASequencer you can create series of MIIS…
I expect that learning to keep the Run History under control is something that most MIIS designers have learnt through unpleasant experience. But in case you haven’t, a brief overview. The Run History is stored in the MicrosoftIdentityIntegrationServer database, and contributes massively to the growth the database. If you don’t regularly delete the Run History,…
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…