Identity Lifecycle Management

Alright... this is probably not something that you would implement as an IT Pro at a company with 15 employees, but for companies with thousands of employees, Identity Management is very critical.  You have line-of-business applications that depend on Active Directory, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Unix...  People login with usernames, passwords, smartcards, tokens...  How do you keep identities consistent across different systems created by different vendors?  The Microsoft solution in this space is Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 (ILM 2007). You can read more about it in the ILM Datasheet.  While ILM is incredibly powerful, it is also not the easiest application to use.  Why do I bring all of this up?

If you would like to have a chance to play with ILM, and get your hands dirty, the product team has just released a Virtual Server/VPC Image of ILM 2007. From the download page:

Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 (ILM 2007) provides an integrated and comprehensive solution for managing the entire lifecycle of user identities and their associated credentials. It provides identity synchronization, certificate and password management, and user provisioning in a single solution that works across Microsoft Windows and other organizational systems. As a result, IT organizations can define and automate the processes used to manage identities from creation to retirement.
This fully functional pre-configured VHD provides you with a trial software that will automatically expire after 30 days.
This is a preconfigured virtual machine contained within the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. A virtualization product that supports the VHD format is required to use this virtual machine. Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Virtual Server are provided for free and can be used with these VHD based virtual machines. Please refer to the system requirements section for more details.