ILM 2 : A powerful Identity Management solution
Microsoft has had been Identity Management via MIIS and ILM 2007.
MIIS – Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003, has been provides various customers a capability to -
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- synchronize the identities across various data sources
- Synchronize the password
- user provisioning, de-provisioning, managing users etc.
However, MIIS lacked the workflows, reporting, powerful self-service capabilities that makes Identity Management solution a complete solution.
ILM 2007 provides MIIS capabilities as well as Certificate Lifecycle Management capabilities. Certificate Lifecycle Management allows organizations to -
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- Manage the life cycle of digital certificates and smart cards
- Centralized administration of certificates and smart cards
- Workflow and policies for activities -
- Configurable policy-based workflows for common tasks
- Enroll/renew/update
- Recover/card replacement
- Revoke
- Retire/disable smart card
- Issue temporary/duplicate smart card
- Personalize smart card
- Self-service capabilities to end-users to reset the PINs, request for above activities
- auditing and reporting; and
- Integration with Active Directory Certificate Services.
ILM 2 provides more capabilities than its predecessor. The capabilities of ILM 2 includes -
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- Extensible Windows Workflow Foundation based workflows -
- allow IT professional to quick create, update and modify the Workflow based on business processes
- Does not require any languages or coding / scripting.
- The workflow are based on WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) which enables organizations to import and reuse the workflows
- Provides WS* APIs to enable customization at product & solution level.
- Extensible Windows Workflow Foundation based workflows -
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- Enforces policies from a centralized Server. The interface is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).
- Management of 3rd Party CAs and OTPs.
- Credential Management using workflows for e.g. automatically provision a user account, set their initial password, and kick off the process to issue smart cards and digital certificates to the user.
- Powerful Self-Service Password Reset – Allows users to reset the password at Desktop logon. Additionally portal based password reset is also available.
- Self-service Profile management – allows users to manage their profiles, raise request for additional accounts, access etc.
- Codeless User Provisioning – Unlike MIIS, ILM 2 does not require writing any codes to perform Identity Management.
- Group Management – Capability to manage the Security groups, DLs in the target systems
- Tighter integration with Office -
- Group Management via Office - Users can use Outlook to raise request for group memberships, DL subscription etc.
- Offline approvals - The Managers can approve the request on mails instead of logging on to portal and approving the request.
These are few of the capabilities that makes ILM 2 a more powerful solution.
High Level Architecture of ILM 2 is as below -
In order to understand how ILM 2 works and have a quick peek look at various scenarios, I would attach the Video of my session in recent Virtual Tech Day, in my next post.