FIM/ILM tricks: 13 months later... FIM 2010 observations and other useful information (maybe)

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Hello Everyone! 

I have had an interesting time the last 13 months or so.  I last posted about trying to create a Fantasy Football engine with ILM "2" and I was trying to get a live feed from a statistics engine to work with.  Needless to say, that never worked out.  Live statistics services are very expensive.  I still want to revisit the concept with fictional data one of these days, however, I have been working with some more practical uses of the product formerly known as ILM "2" and currently known as FIM 2010 (Forefront Identity Manager) and I want to share some of the experiences here. 

So in the last 13 months, I have worked with ILM "2" and ILM 2007 and FIM 2010 in various projects and I have been kept very busy.  I have seen ILM "2" evolve into FIM 2009 and then 2010 and I am definitely happy with the work the FIM product group has done.  They took some extra time getting some things right and I feel the end result will a very solid product. 

A few observations:

  • The FIM Synchronization Service and Synchronization Manager are nearly identical to the MIIS Service in MIIS 2003/ILM 2007 with some performance improvements.  Any previous configuration created in MIIS 2003/ILM 2007 should translate nicely into the FIM Sync Service, including rules extensions.
  • The FIM Portal takes a while to get used to, especially if you are not versed in IIS or Sharepoint but the resources available on TechNet  definitely make up for someone (like me) who is a specialist in MIIS/ILM making the transition to FIM
  • READ THE RELEASE NOTES!!  Trust me.  Also, while you read the Getting Started pages, don't skip steps. 

So also during my time away from the Blogosphere, I got to work on some interesting projects, including the Microsoft Retail Stores, where I created a management agent for Dynamics AX using the Extensible Connectivity Management Agent and the Dynamics AX Business Connector.  I will post more details about the Dynamics AX management agent on my MSDN blog soon. 

Definitely more to come, hopefully this time it won't be 13 months later. 

 --Shawn

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.