Dominik's Cloud Security Blog

Mark Wahl, Principal Program Manager, announced the availability of the FIM 2010 R2 RC today!

(http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/11/23/forefront-identity-manager-2010-r2-release-candidate-now-available.aspx)
This release candidate includes new and updated features for FIM 2010 R2:

• Historical reporting using integration to the System Center Service Manager data warehouse
• Web-based Self-Service Password Reset
• Scale and performance improvements
• Outlook® 2010 support for the FIM add-ins and extensions and SharePoint® 2010 support for the FIM Portal

You can download the RC bits from this link: http://bit.ly/svx2XX

Very interesting…

Today Microsoft announced that they have acquired technology assets from BHOLD, a dutch vendor of Access Governance technology. Microsoft thus now owns technology which has been missing in their IAM portfolio until now. Microsoft thus enters the Access Governance market. Whether that will happen through enhancements of their existing FIM 2010 product or by adding another product based on the BHOLD technology hasn’t been announced yet. Anyhow, the deal will change the Access Governance market, particularly regarding the offerings which are targeted to complement Microsoft FIM.

KuppingerCole will follow up on this news and provide further information as soon as it is available. Overall, this acquisitions proves that Microsoft continues investing in the broader IAM space and thus rates this market segment as important to their customers. For existing BHOLD customers, the acquisition provides new opportunities given that they are working with a much bigger vendor now. However, the impact on existing customers can be rated first when the Microsoft roadmap is unveiled. In general we recommend existing BHOLD customers to stay calm until more information is available. For customers investing or planning to invest into FIM 2010, the acquisition is definitely good news because it means that FIM will grow beyond the somewhat technical approach into a more business-oriented solution over time. However, without the roadmap being unveiled it is hard to predict when Microsoft customers really will benefit.

Source: http://blogs.kuppingercole.com/kuppinger/2011/09/23/microsoft-acquires-bhold-technology-assets/

You can find more information here as well: http://www.microsoft.com/pathways/bhold/

An often raised question in an ILM migration project is how the custom source code (rule extension for Management Agents or the Metaverse) has to be migrated.

With this post, I want to highlight the necessary steps when migrating an ILM rule extension to FIM 2010:

1. Copy the source code (Visual Studio project) from the \SourceCode folder from the ILM server to the FIM server
2. Open the Visual Studio project with Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010 (Visual Studio will automatically upgrade the project)
3. Change the platform target to x64 (solution Properties > Build)
   
4. * Reference the new Microsoft.MetadirectoryServicesEx assembly (delete the reference to the Microsoft.MetadirectoryServices.dll and add a new reference to the Microsoft.MetadirectoryServicesEx.dll)
   
5. Recompile all code using .Net 3.5
6. Perform complete end-to-end testing

* Your upgraded rule extension might still references the old Microsoft.MetadirectoryServices assembly. This version was released in earlier versions of the sync server. Although it is possible to recompile your rule extension with the old assembly reference, it is recommended to reference to the new assembly, that allows for strong-name signing of rules extensions and of data source extensions. You can find both assemblies in the \bin\Assemblies folder of FIM:

Of course, a test environment for the migration is highly recommended although not mentioned in the list above.

A page that you should bookmark: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/fim-2010-build-overview.aspx

This wiki lists all available updates for FIM 2010.