What’s New in Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2 PS3?

Since autumn 2014, I have been keenly participating in workshops and demonstrations conducted by Oracle to announce features of Oracle Identity Management 11gR2 PS3. However, I decided not to pen my thoughts about it until the release date is formally announced. The official date for release has still not been announced until now but expected release date is somewhere in current month (April 2015).

Below are some of the main features that have been announced in Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2 PS3.

• Business Friendly Self Service Experience

UI Simplification has been a continued agenda item for Oracle’s Identity Manager which is further improved in PS3. Self Service Dashboard has been made very simple and Tablet-Friendly for end users. The icons also show notification badge/count of pending tasks and actions that require user attention. See below screenshot for icons of Certifications, My Open Tasks and Pending Approvals.

• Intelligent Access Catalog

The selection of accesses in a request has been made simple through guided navigation, recommendations on the basis of pre-defined & user access criteria and smart search form. 

The user will be provided a list of recommended accesses as well as a new tab to request bundles of accesses together. The bundle of similar accesses has been made available through Request Profile feature. A good use case would be a request profile of all accesses, mandatory for new hires with the name of “On-Boarding accesses”.

Start and End Date of an access can also be mentioned while requesting an access.

• Preventative SOD Analysis

SOD Analysis has been made efficient and preventative by warning user about violation before the submission of request. User can submit request with violations of security policy, which will be shown to approvers as well. Also it will be marked as high risk during Access Certification process.

• Intelligent and Flexible Certifications

UI for Certification process has also been made simple and business friendly. I am not going to write detail of Certification Tasks and Approval screens one by one but following screenshots are quite self-explanatory.

• Comprehensive Role Lifecycle Management

Role Management has also been made available in Oracle Identity Manager and simple for business users to create and change easily. Comprehensive role analytics allows business users to see the impact of new roles and changes to existing ones.

Role Owners can reduce role explosion by reviewing the effectiveness of existing roles and consolidate new roles with existing one. Comprehensive auditing and prior versions of roles has also been made visible to Role Owners.

I will cover Access Management, Directory Services and Mobile Security parts of PS3 after official release of the product, so stay tuned :)

7th Annual Oracle EMEA Customer Advisory Board for IAM

This year the EMEA Customer Advisory Board (CAB) for Identity & Access Management was held in Paris from 23rd to 25th March. Representatives from Oracle product management and A-Team met with customers from all over the Europe to discuss market trends, product direction, and to get feedback on current and future versions of products.

Day 1 started after the lunch when Christian Patrascu and John Waghorne welcomed all the attendees and conducted an introductory session. The first presentation was from Jim Taylor, Sr. Director IDM Product Management, who delivered an impressive presentation to address the Market Trends and future scope of Identity Management. Rest of the day was updates from Identity Governance and Access Management departments on PS3 features and 12c roadmap.

Day 2 started with a presentation from Oracle A-Team about avoiding common IAM deployment pitfalls. The presenter also highlighted, how A-Team works with customers and partners, to provide guidance on implementing best practices, architecture, troubleshooting and how best to use Oracle products to solve customer business needs. After A-Team’s presentation, Oracle Product Management gave an update on Mobile Security and Directory Services for PS3 and 12c releases. Rest of the day was a customer presentation where they shared the experience of successfully rolling out Oracle Mobile Security in their organization. The day ended with a moderated discussion about Enterprise Cloud Adoption. It was an interesting group discussion where customers talked about their plans and challenges of consuming cloud services.

The last day contained a customer go-live presentation where they presented challenges, opportunities and implementation process of Oracle IDM product in their organization. After customer presentation, product management gave an update on Enterprise Manager for IDM.  The last agenda item of CAB was a moderated discussion on Evolving Enterprise IDM and Oracle Cloud IDM Direction. After the end of official agenda, customers had also booked one to one sessions with Product Management teams to discuss their Organization specific use cases.

Overall, CAB was again a mutual success, which proved beneficial to both the Oracle Product Teams, who collected valuable feedback from customers, and for customers to hear directly from the product teams about upcoming product releases and direction.  Customers also showed great interest in hearing from other customers about their implementations and plans.

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