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Showing posts from 2015

Resources from WIN332 Microsoft Ignite Session

Thanks to all who came along to my session at Microsoft Ignite today. Here are the resources I presented at today’s session WIN332 – From Fortran to FIM: Dragging your identity management system of our the dark ages. Resources for Engineers and Admins Lithnet ACMA Codeless business rules engine ACMA is a fast, efficient, codeless way of implementing business rules that can create and transform information within your FIM/MIM implementation. ACMA comes with a UI editor for your rules file, a PowerShell module for modifying ACMA objects directly, and a unit testing engine that allows you to test all the rules you have created. Check out the video link below for a more detailed demonstration of the capabilities of ACMA Lithnet Universal MA Rules Extension (UMARE) UMARE is a codeless rules extension for FIM/MIM. It can be used on any MA to perform transform operations on incoming and outgoing identity data. With over 40 transforms available out of the box, including very common scena

Providing confirming imports to the sync engine when your target system doesn’t support delta imports

There are many systems out there that just don’t support delta imports. Deltas are important for ensuring speedy and efficient operation of the FIM synchronization engine. While we can’t invent true deltas when the connected system doesn’t provide the information, sometimes its enough to just provide FIM the deltas of what it has changed. This is especially relevant for systems where FIM is mostly responsible for the data in the connected system. What would be handy, is if at export time, we could provide FIM with the confirmed changes made in the target system. While FIM allows us to say that an export was successful, it still expects to confirm those changes took place on the next import operation. What if we could construct our import CSEntryChange objects at export time? The Lithnet.MetadirectoryServices library contains a set of helper classes to make writing management agents and rules extensions a little bit easier. One of the tools it contains is a CSEntryChangeQueue clas

Take the guess work out of XPath with the Lithnet FIM Service PowerShell Module

Summary The FIM Service allows you to query for resources using a subset of the XPath 2.0 dialect. It provides a quite powerful mechanism for searching for resources, but has more than a few curiosities when it comes to constructing queries for different attribute types. The Lithnet FIM Service PowerShell module includes three cmdlets to help take the guess work out of constructing your XPath queries. New-XPathQuery The New-XPathQuery cmdlet creates a predicate that forms part of an XPath expression. The query is the Attribute = ‘value’ component of the expression New-XPathQueryGroup An XPath query group contains multiple XPath query objects, or other query groups, that are combined together with an ‘and’ or ‘or’ operator. New-XPathExpression The XPath expression wraps the query or query group with the appropriate syntax defining the object type (eg /Person[query] ) Working with different attribute types The cmdlets generate the correct syntax for each attribute type,

Cut down on your PowerShell code with the Lithnet FIM Service PowerShell module

The FIMAutomation PowerShell module requires you to write a lot of code to perform even the most basic tasks. Let’s have a look at the following example in which Paul Williams provides some very well-written code for updating the EmployeeEndDate attribute of a user using the FIMAutomation snap-in. Now lets look at doing the same thing with the Lithnet FIM Service PowerShell module The same task requires much less code, and much easier to understand. Perhaps most importantly, we don’t need to understand the inner workings of the FIM Service itself (import changes, put operations, etc) to do something as simple as updating an attribute value. Just get, set, and save.

Version control your FIM Service configuration

Keeping track of your FIM Service configuration can seem like a daunting task. Even more so when you have multiple DEV, QA, and production instances that need to be kept consistent. We can make version controlling the FIM service a lot easier with some simple modifications to the schema, some clever scripts and a bit of process control. This post will reference the configuration management capabilities of the Lithnet FIM Service PowerShell module , but the same concepts can apply even when using your own tools. Firstly, break up your FIM service design into components. A component is a collection of resources such as sets, MPRs and workflows that come together to perform a particular function. For example, the self-service password reset functionality can be grouped together as an SSPR component. You might have a group of workflows, sets and email templates that handle expiry notifications. I generally use the following components as a starting point; User Interface (RCDCs, Nav b