Oracle Identity Manager – Gleaming with New Dimensions

Year 2014 began with release of patch set 2 (PS2) for Oracle Identity and Access Management suite 11gR2 and it was a pleasure and moment of fulfillment while being involved in beta testing of the same for over 2 months.

I believe that open and transparent two way communication should be an integral part of our daily lives thus continually strive to meet customer satisfaction and felt fully responsible to convey the customer’s voice, experienced as a Shared Services Solution Provider of Identity and Access Management to group companies, operating around the globe.

It was so worthy experience to be actively involved in the beta testing which also includes enhanced and interesting features towards Access Manager and Entitlements Server, though the focus area was limited to Identity Governance.

The purpose to prioritize Identity Governance module was only to explore the most desired features which application lacked since its inception resulting to introduce complex customized layer in our organization on top of the standard OIM architecture. Let’s skip the details of customized layer which I intend to cover in some other article. Here I shall try to focus on the features of Identity Manager 11gR2 PS2, and elucidate the business drivers of new release.

Shared Services for Governance

Multi-tenancy is the most important driver of new release which helps users belonging to different organizations to have their own policies for self-registration, notifications, password management, user creation rules and relevant shared service features. The functionality, often called Dynamic membership, also allows users to become member of multiple organizations.

The much awaited part of functionality is the ability to offer application instances to be published on an organization level and/or sub-orgs level to secure the scope of access request management.

Multiple views of the Catalog

The second important driver of the release is requirements from customers to present criteria-driven Catalogs e.g. Catalogs by Country, by employment types, Catalogs showing only entitlements for an application etc.

Complex Entitlements support

There are applications which require additional information to be provided along with the request for provisioning of accounts and entitlements e.g. eBusiness suite, DataBase, Citrix and thanks to PS2 for offering the ability to add additional attributes in the cart.

Another interesting feature is allowing users to upload complex hierarchical metadata about an entitlement. An example could be to show users with SharePoint folders/ Windows file shares that they can get access to when granted a group.

UI Simplification

UI Simplification has been a continued agenda item for Oracle’s Identity Management product which is further improved in PS2. Introducing support for additional attributes for cart items, cloning requests, draft requests, removing dependency of Entitlements over Accounts, Catalog with pre-defined beneficiaries, hierarchical Catalog and multiple views of catalog are all inclusions towards UI Simplification.

It should be admitted that for many of the Identity Management customers, slow performance had been a major challenge towards application self-service for end users. Good news is that PS2 release introduces new ADF skin Skyros which contains lightweight components hence the Performance is ultimately improved by only showing relevant information instead of all, and additional information can only be seen through inline dialogs.

Other salient features of PS2 Identity Manager are listed below:

• Improved Diagnostics: Fusion Middleware control as the Operational console
• Administrators can see the defined operations (Orchestrations)
• Can see the OOB and customer-defined Event Handlers, their state as well as errors, if any
• Can drill across into the BPEL workflow or OIM request
• Can drill into child orchestrations
• Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) 11g customers can migrate completed Certifications into Oracle Identity Governance Platform
• Configurable workflows allowing customers to extend Access Certification and introduce additional levels of approval
• Improved SSO support towards OpenSSO, Tivoli Access Manager, CA SiteMinder and XIMDD
• Improved sandbox functionality
• Enrich self-service personalization features