FIM R2 Showdown -- Classic vs. Declarative

Come join me at The Experts Conference 2012 in San Diego April 29 - May2 where I will be presenting:

FIM R2 Showdown — Classic vs. Declarative
Speaker: David Lundell

Is there room enough for both in this town? FIM 2010 R2 has two ways of accomplishing many tasks: Classic and Declarative. Attend this showdown to learn when to saddle up Classic vs. when to saddle up with Declarative Sync Rules and why. Dissenting opinions politely welcomed — join the controversy! Discussion will take into account performance, ease of implementation and maintainability.

My colleague Lutz Mueller-Hipper has been selected to present three sessions:

Data Loss Prevention with RMS: 2012 the Year of RMS
Speaker: Lutz Mueller-Hipper

In this session we talk about the reasons for RMS and the battle against PKI. RMS is growing up, so let’s see what we got with Mac Office, for unsupported documents formats and automatic data classification tools. We will also cover what is new with RMS in Windows 8 and RMS in the Cloud.

EZ PKI and PKI Housekeeping
Speaker: Lutz Mueller-Hipper

It is time to use PKI to simplify computer management, and this session will go over design recommendations and security aspects for scenarios with Wifi and VPN. Don’t just do it, do it right, and see why and how. The second part of this session will discuss user certificates in the wild, how to publish them securely with AD LDS and what needs to be done for housekeeping in Active Directory for PKI.

Public/Private Cloud Application Security and Single Sign On with BYOD –
Tear Down the Walls
Speaker: Lutz Mueller-Hipper

The IT business is moving rapidly to cloud based solutions. Want to know what that means to the traditional network infrastructure and how you can run an open but secured network? The session will look at all those things from an application level and authentication in enterprises with classic SSO and federation.

For all of the Directory and Identity Abstracts

Referenced by Other works and Sale at Lulu

I was pleasantly surprised today to find three other books, referencing FIM Best Practices Volume 1, which because of a Lulu Sale you can get at 25% off until 12/14/2011 Coupon Code: BUYMYBOOK305 Coupon expires December 14, 2011 $50 Max Savings. Of course today only 30% off, CYBERMONDAY305.

All three have an identical blurb about FIM and reference FIM Best Practices Volume 1 as additional material.

Title	Author
User Provisioning: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors	Kevin Roebuck (Jun 7, 2011)
Excerpt - Page 138: "... TechNet Wiki [7] FIM Best Practices Volume 1: Introduction ..."
Run Book Automation: What you Need to Know For IT Operations Management	by Michael Johnson (May 3, 2011)
Excerpt - Page 74: "... Microsoft TechNet Wiki [7] FIM Best Practices Volume 1 ..."
Federated Id management: High-impact Strategies - What You Need to Know: Definitions, Adoptions, Impact, Benefits, Maturity, Vendors	by Kevin Roebuck (Jun 7, 2011)
Excerpt - Page 148: "... TechNet Wiki [7] FIM Best Practices Volume 1: Introduction ..."

Although the blurb lists the license for FIM as Shareware. I hadn’t thought that FIM would fit the definition of Shareware.

All three appear to start with an introductory paper, and the contain a compilation of articles on various related technologies.

FIM exam 70-158 is now live oh and I passed

Exam 70-158: TS: Forefront Identity Manager 2010, Configuring is now live according to the MSL web site. I also received an email indicating that I passed the beta.

What the %_ is the deal with wildcards in FIM Queries in the latest hotfix?

Ok I am not actually swearing, nor are those substitute words, rather % and _ are two characters that until hotfix rollup package (build 4.0.3594.2) could be used to perform some much needed and cool searches for sets, search scopes, groups and 3rd party client queries against FIM. Such as querying for the presence of string attributes.

I am sure what happened is that someone created a resource with an underscore in the name and then couldn’t search for it. So the fix. However it wasn’t broken. We need this functionality. Furthermore, simply enclosing the wildcard character in [] would cause it to be evaluated as a literal.

The secret, as I previously blogged, is that FIM takes what you type in (on some searches) and passes it as the right hand parameter of the T-SQL LIKE operator. Ergo, whatever wildcards you can do with LIKE you can do here. Was this a form of SQL injection? Perhaps, but I tested it for other kinds of SQL injection, such as adding a single quote and other commands, and those don’t work. So it wasn’t a vulnerability, but a feature. Undocumented? Sure, but needed.

Using Wildcard Characters As Literals

You can use the wildcard pattern matching characters as literal characters. To use a wildcard character as a literal character, enclose the wildcard character in brackets. The following table shows several examples of using the LIKE keyword and the [ ] wildcard characters

The problem with this hotfix is that it destroys our ability to build sets and queries that test for presence of values in string attributes. This will break many of the implementations of FIM that I and my team have done. We need a mechanism for detecting nulls in the attributes in the FIM Service database so that we can create sets based on the presence or absence of attributes.

Some might say that we can use DRE’s to accomplish this too, but the calculation of sets of objects that have DRE is non-trivial requiring the creation of an Outbound Sync Rule, the creation of a set of DRE objects, and then another set of objects whose DRL has members in the first set. But worst of all this only applies to attributes in the connector space and their matching attribute in the Metaverse and requires a few syncs and I cannot apply this approach to attributes that exist only in the FIM Service, but not in the Metaverse.

Another alternative would be to create an IsPresent function in the XPath queries, but please ensure that it works on all attribute types.

Preference of fixes (in decreasing order of desirability):

1) We can still use the wildcards in the queries, but have a way to escape them and get an IsPresent function, in other words roll back this portion of the fix and teach/document how to have the wildcards treated as literals.

2) If we can’t do that then I would prefer to see an IsPresent function in the XPath

3) If we can’t do that still use the wildcards in the queries, but have a way to escape them

Official text from hotfix rollup package (build 4.0.3594.2):

Issue 2

Revised the FIM "Query and Sets" features to correctly treat percent signs, underscores, and opening brackets as literals instead of as SQL wildcard characters.
The approved character sets for strings that are used in FIM attribute values are defined in the attribute and binding schema in the FIM service. The syntax for representing an XPath filter is documented on MSDN in the following "FIM XPath Filter Dialect" article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee652287.aspx ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee652287.aspx)

Some customers may have included characters that SQL defines as query wildcard characters, such as the percent character, in FIM searches and Set filters. In this case, the customers intended FIM to treat the characters as SQL wildcard characters. This is not a documented or supported feature of the product. In some cases, customers may be able to achieve the intended functionality by removing the wildcard and by using a “contains” query/filter instead.
Existing Set resources that have filters that contain SQL wildcard characters may not continue to function as the filters functioned before this hotfix was applied. Also, a filter that contains wildcard characters and that continued to function as expected after the hotfix was applied may function differently if the administrator later updates the filter definition.
Customers who used characters that SQL defined as query wildcard characters must check and revise their Set filters either before or after they upgrade to this hotfix. Customers should consider the impact of Set membership changes on Set transition MPRs. And, customers may want to temporarily disable MPRs or update workflow definitions while they change their Set filters to avoid unintentionally triggering provisioning or deprovisioning operations during Set definition maintenance.

FIM 2010 hotfix available (4.0.3594.2)

Microsoft has released a new hotfix (kb 2520954) at the end of October with some key fixes in it as well as one item that I will blog about next that prevents me from loading this on most implementations, until it is addressed.

Highlights

Component	Official Description	Comments
Workflow Engine (FIM Service)	Assume that you perform an operation that accesses the SQL database when the Microsoft SQL Server connection pooling feature is enabled in the FIM server. For example, you run a query or a request. If the operation times out for any reason, a future operation on the same thread may fail until that thread is removed from the SQL connection pool. An error message that resembles the following is displayed in the FIM Service Application event log, in the RequestStatusDetails property for a request, or in the WorkflowStatusDetails property of a workflow instance: Cannot enlist in the transaction because a local transaction is in progress on the connection. Additionally, the time stamp is the same as the time when the operation fails.	An operation on a thread that make a sql call that times out poisons the thread and all future operations on the thread fail. This could have lead to other problems that were hard to reproduce. Kudos on this one
Sync Engine	An ExpectedRulesEntry (ERE) object is associated to a child synchronization rule of a Metaverse object. If the ERE object has a Remove action, deprovisioning of the object is also being triggered. Then, the behavior causes the deletion of the Metaverse object	Much needed fix to ensure that deprovisioning doesn’t fire incorrecltly.
	Fixes many "Export not reimported" errors that might occur because of errors in SQL.	Hallelujah – we see a fair amount of those. Would like to see more detail on that one
	Improves the performance of all Sync Engine operations. Note This change involves an extensive upgrade to the sync database. This upgrade can take lots of time, depending on your hardware. A progress bar is displayed during the database upgrade.	Ok plan for a long time for your update. Be sure to back it up. This also sounds like a future blog article, to look a little deeper as to the changes.
	Feature 2 The FIM 2010 Active Directory Management Agent (AD MA) does not honor the preferred domain controller list when passwords are exported. This is an issue for customers who require password changes to flow to a specific set of domain controllers. This hotfix rollup package changes the AD MA to use the preferred domain controller list first. If the preferred domain controller list does not exist, the domain controller locator service will identify a domain controller for password export operations. Additionally, you can still force password operations to use the primary domain controller by setting the following registry subkey: Subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\FIMSynchronizationService\Parameters\PerMAInstance\<MA_name> Value: UsePDCForPasswordOperations (REG_DWORD, 1 = True, 0 = False) This hotfix rollup package also updates the AD MA so that a trust relationship with the configured Active Directory forest is not required to export passwords to that forest.	This will be very helpful in large environments. Prior to this all password operations on FIM were targeting the PDC Emulator, which incidentally introduced a single point of failure. I also applaud the elimination of the need for the trust to do password exports!
	Feature 3 Adds the ability to filter objects before they are imported into the AD MA connector space.	Another big win for large environments where we need to ignore large portions of the domain!
Sets and Query (FIM Service)	Fixes an issue that would sometimes cause incorrect Set calculations. This resulted in lots of set corrections. Also revised the Sets Correction job so that it does not change special sets that are maintained by another system maintenance job.	Thank you!
FIM MA	Fixes an issue in which the FIM synchronization service configuration for synchronization rules and codeless provisioning was not correctly written to the FIM Service database.	Seen this one. Glad to have a fix.
FIM Service	Fixes an issue in which unexpected data in the FIM Service database could result in the FIM MA causing the Synchronization service to fail during import, and a stopped-server error occurred.	Seen this one too.
	Issue 4 Some ExpectedRuleEntry objects and DetectedRuleEntry objects in FIM 2010 can become "orphaned" over time. When a DetectedRuleEntry object is not referenced in the DetectedRulesList of any object in the system, that object is determined to be orphaned. Similarly, when an ExpectedRuleEntry object is not referenced in the ExpectedRulesList of any object in the system, that object is also determined to be orphaned.	Once more thank you.

TEC 2012 call for papers open for 2 more days

The Experts Conference Call for Papers still open until Nov 18th

http://www.theexpertsconference.com/us/2012/submit-a-paper/ 

For general info: http://www.theexpertsconference.com/us/2012/

I have attended at spoke at this conference since 2007. I love it. It is a great experience and loads of great in-depth technical training by top experts on Directory & Identity, as well as SharePoint, Exchange, Virtualization & Cloud and PowerShell Deep Dive. Also come and learn about the inside joke dealing with the rubber chicken.

Awesome FIM Case Study

 

Microsoft recently published a case study about our work at Grand Canyon University, implementing a FIM 2010 based identity management solution.

The document is available for download directly from HERE on the www.ensynch.com website. 

It will also be published on Microsoft’s official case study website as well.  http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/

Get 15% off of FIM Best Practices Volume 1

Through Sept 26th get 15% of FIM Best Practices Volume 1 at lulu.com

Use the following code at checkout OKTOBERFEST305

Get 20% of FIM Best Practices Volume 1

 

Buy FIM Best Practices Volume 1 in Soft Cover or E-Book

Enter coupon code SEPTEMBER305 at checkout and receive 20% off your order. The maximum savings for this offer is $100. Offer expires on September 9 at 11:59 PM

Using FIM Best Practices Volume 1 to study for the FIM exam

Ok so info on the exam and its list of items covered is provided here

For fun I thought I would map out the domain objectives to items in the FIM Best Practices Volume 1

The book helps with items in area 1 Planning a FIM Implementation and Installing FIM.

Objective	Chapter
1. Planning a FIM Implementation and Installing FIM
1.1 Plan and design FIM topology	4 and 5
1.2. Install the FIM Service and the FIM Portal.	6 and 7
1.3 Upgrade Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS)/Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) to FIM 2010	not covered
1.4. Deploy and manage client components.	6 and 7
1.5. Implement disaster recovery for FIM 2010.	Chapter 9 partially covers this

Beta Exam for FIM available until Aug 4th

http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/weblog/archive/2011/07/18/forefront-identity-manager-fim-beta-exam-now-available.aspx

Beta exam 71-158, TS: Forefront Identity Manager 2010, Configuring

So in a short while we should see some folks who are actually Microsoft Certified Technical Specialists(MCTS)  for FIM!

FIM Bug for multi-valued strings that need approval

I think I found a bug in FIM Version 4.0.3576.2 take a look:

It appears that when you have a multi-valued string attribute when you add more than 1 value at a time and you need approval to create the object or to update the attribute, the request will fail. In the event log you will see an error (UnwillingToPerformException … CREATE UNIQUE INDEX statement terminated because a duplicate key was found for the object).

 

 

Log Name: Forefront Identity Manager

Source: Microsoft.ResourceManagement

Date: 6/27/2011 6:33:52 PM

Event ID: 3

Task Category: None

Level: Error

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: fimserver

Description:

Microsoft.ResourceManagement.WebServices.Exceptions.UnwillingToPerformException: Other ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Reraised Error 50000, Level 16, State 1, Procedure ReRaiseException, Line 37, Message: Reraised Error 50000, Level 16, State 1, Procedure ReRaiseException, Line 37, Message: Reraised Error 1505, Level 16, State 1, Procedure ReEvaluateRequestOutputString, Line 53, Message: The CREATE UNIQUE INDEX statement terminated because a duplicate key was found for the object name 'dbo.#reevaluateRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate______________________________________________________________________0000000175F1' and the index name 'IX_ReEvaluateRequestRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate_ObjectKey_ObjectTypeKey_AttributeKey_ValueString'. The duplicate key value is (23564, 32698, 32655, 0).

Uncommittable transaction is detected at the end of the batch. The transaction is rolled back.

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection)

at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning(TdsParserStateObject stateObj)

at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Run(RunBehavior runBehavior, SqlCommand cmdHandler, SqlDataReader dataStream, BulkCopySimpleResultSet bulkCopyHandler, TdsParserStateObject stateObj)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.ConsumeMetaData()

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.get_MetaData()

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.FinishExecuteReader(SqlDataReader ds, RunBehavior runBehavior, String resetOptionsString)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReaderTds(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, Boolean async)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method, DbAsyncResult result)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior behavior, String method)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader()

at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.DataAccess.ProcessRequest(RequestType request)

--- End of inner exception stack trace ---

Event Xml:

<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">

<System>

<Provider Name="Microsoft.ResourceManagement" />

<EventID Qualifiers="0">3</EventID>

<Level>2</Level>

<Task>0</Task>

<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>

<TimeCreated SystemTime="2011-06-28T01:33:52.000000000Z" />

<EventRecordID>9448</EventRecordID>

<Channel>Forefront Identity Manager</Channel>

<Computer>fimserver</Computer>

<Security />

</System>

<EventData>

<Data>Microsoft.ResourceManagement.WebServices.Exceptions.UnwillingToPerformException: Other ---&gt; System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Reraised Error 50000, Level 16, State 1, Procedure ReRaiseException, Line 37, Message: Reraised Error 50000, Level 16, State 1, Procedure ReRaiseException, Line 37, Message: Reraised Error 1505, Level 16, State 1, Procedure ReEvaluateRequestOutputString, Line 53, Message: The CREATE UNIQUE INDEX statement terminated because a duplicate key was found for the object name 'dbo.#reevaluateRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate______________________________________________________________________0000000175F1' and the index name 'IX_ReEvaluateRequestRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate_ObjectKey_ObjectTypeKey_AttributeKey_ValueString'. The duplicate key value is (23564, 32698, 32655, 0).

Uncommittable transaction is detected at the end of the batch. The transaction is rolled back.

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection)

at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning(TdsParserStateObject stateObj)

at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Run(RunBehavior runBehavior, SqlCommand cmdHandler, SqlDataReader dataStream, BulkCopySimpleResultSet bulkCopyHandler, TdsParserStateObject stateObj)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.ConsumeMetaData()

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.get_MetaData()

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.FinishExecuteReader(SqlDataReader ds, RunBehavior runBehavior, String resetOptionsString)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReaderTds(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, Boolean async)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method, DbAsyncResult result)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior behavior, String method)

at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader()

at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.DataAccess.ProcessRequest(RequestType request)

--- End of inner exception stack trace ---</Data>

</EventData>

</Event>

So I looked up the stored procedure mentioned in the Error Message.

We can see that this stored procedure can get called from a lot of places and so can be an issue in many spots.

The problem is found in the text of the ReEvaluateRequestOutputString stored procedure excerpted here below with my comments added inside /* */:

SELECT DISTINCT

[requestOriginal].[ObjectKey] AS N'ObjectKey',

[requestOriginal].[ObjectTypeKey] AS N'ObjectTypeKey',

[requestOriginal].[AttributeKey] AS N'AttributeKey',

[requestOriginal].[ValueString] AS N'ValueString',

[requestOriginal].[Deleted] AS N'Deleted'

INTO #reevaluateRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate

FROM [fim].[RequestOutputString] AS [requestOriginal]

WHERE

[requestOriginal].[RequestKey] = @originalRequestKey

ORDER BY

[ObjectKey],

[ObjectTypeKey],

[AttributeKey],

[ValueString];

/* Which results in

Note that the last two rows will cause a problem with the next command because they have the same values in the objectkey, objecttypekey, attribute key and deleted columns.

Yet the adding of two values to a multi-valued string is a legal operation.

*/

CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX [IX_ReEvaluateRequestRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate_ObjectKey_ObjectTypeKey_AttributeKey_ValueString]

ON #reevaluateRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate

(

[ObjectKey],

[ObjectTypeKey],

[AttributeKey],

[Deleted]

);

/* Resulting error:

Msg 1505, Level 16, State 1, Line 26

The CREATE UNIQUE INDEX statement terminated because a duplicate key was found for the object name 'dbo.#reevaluateRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate______________________________________________________________________0000000178D0' and the index name 'IX_ReEvaluateRequestRequestOutputStringRemovalCandidate_ObjectKey_ObjectTypeKey_AttributeKey_ValueString'. The duplicate key value is (23623, 32698, 32655, 0).

The statement has been terminated.

*/

/*

Then the whole transaction rolls back and the request fails

*/

SQL Extensible Management Agents That Scale (Rebecca Croft)

Rebecca, a fellow Ensynchian, presented at TEC 2011 on the limitations of the standard out of the box SQL Management and how she overcame them by writing a very fast eXtensible Management Agent (XMA).

First attempt use ado.net sql reader to read data (really fast) and write one row at a time to the AVP file (but that gets slow when dealing with large data sets).

Second attempt use the T-SQL “FOR XML” clause to transform the data to XML and then use an XSLT to transform to LDIF.

So the XMA executes a T-SQL statement to export the data to XML and then XSLT to transform to LDIF and then returns the LDIF file to the FIM Synchronization Service.

She even showed off a wizard to create the XMA for us. When it completed successfully she received a spontaneous round of applause.

RCDC Editor

As previously discussed the RCDC is a very powerful tool for customizing FIM without writing your own front-end and web client. There are several drawbacks to the RCDC. The worst is that you have to export the RCDC to an xml file, open it up in your favorite XML editor, modify it by hand, load it back into the FIM Portal and then run iisreset. All of which means that mistakes are quite painful, as it can take you several minutes to discover your mistake. Worse if you made more than one change. Ugh!

So thanks to my friends over at Tools4FIM there is an RCDC editor. While not perfect it can shave hours off your time to edit RCDC’s.

You get an almost WYSIWYG editor that saves you from making many easy simple mistakes. If I need to tweak something simple I might for go it, but then again I have lots of experience tweaking the RCDC by hand (painful experience). For $245 for a project I can get an editor that makes life much simpler. No brainer!

I highly recommend watching the demo videos as the UI is good but not perfectly intuitive. I found several “bugs” only to discover that I needed to learn just a bit more about the tool. Watching the videos will help you have a better beginning experience with the editor.

You will need to run a PowerShell command to export the FIM Configuration, install the software before you can use it at all. After activating the license you can save the RCDC’s as XML. Then yes you still have to load the RCDC manually and run iisreset. Nonetheless, this is still much easier.

While you are still learning more about what the RCDC can do, this is still an iterative process. Creating an RCDC for a new FIM resource type is now a 2-8 hour job instead of 8-32 hour job.

The Resultant Rights Editor is a nice bonus that allows you to setup scenarios (who is accessing what resource and which attributes to include) so that you can see what control will be visible, and enabled for the different users.

Three complaints (with paraphrased responses from Tools4FIM):

1) When I purchased the tool the purchase was for a 1 year license – I wasn’t warned anywhere that this was only for a 1 year license until I was completing the purchase. I didn’t spot it in the EULA when I installed the demo version (yes I did read it, if I missed it please let me know). In my opinion, limit the license by time or project, not both. (You get licensed for 1 project – one FIM install, for one year).

– Apparently, the one year bit is that you only have 1 year to activate the license. You get the license without a time limit. I love it when my complaints are resolved before I make them.

2) Sometimes I may want to add a control that doesn’t really have anything to do with an attribute, yet the tool forces me to name the control after the attribute.

-- Next version (due out Q3) and they intend to allow those that purchase now access to that new version without penalty.

3) When adding/editing UocDropDownList controls it doesn’t let me set the Caption (what the users sees) for the Option differently than the Value (what the computer sees). It lets me set a hint but not the Caption.

Yes I did read the help file which tells me that I can do it but not how. So I do think that is a bug.

-- Aha! They told me that there is a way to do this. When you modify the Value:

<edited 6/23/2011>

The Option Value is the value (what the computer will see – SA) and the Constant is the caption that the user will see (Admin Account).

So it looks like this:

</edited>

Wish list:

1) Copy all of the XML data sources (like regions, or other custom data sources) so that I can manage them centrally and copy them into other RCDC’s. That way if a new country is born tomorrow, or next year, I only have one place to go update the list of countries and their codes instead of in several different RCDC’s for several different resource types.

2) Let me copy all of the settings from one control to another. Sometimes I want 4 text boxes right after another with all of the same settings, just different binding.

-- Next version and they promised to name the feature after me

3) XML editor (or link to) so that I can open it up for the manual tweaks that RCDC Editor doesn’t do yet.

-- They are thinking about it for the next version.

4) Add the ability to run the export PowerShell script from the tool (probably also need to let me configure the exact command line).

-- Already planning on it in the next version

5) Add the ability to upload the RCDC right from the tool, optionally running iisreset.

-- Already planning on it in the next version

6) Home Page and Nav Bar editing, especially with the Resultant Rights Evaluator.

7) FIM Portal style sheet editing

8) Ability to diffs with previous versions (whether stored by the Editor or by querying the FIM Service for recent requests to modify the RCDC

Bottom line: This is a tool that I as a FIM implementer can’t live without, especially at the $245 price.

RCDC Requiring another field

Ok I just had to blog this.

I created a custom resource type in FIM for resource mailboxes (Room and Equipment) with accompanying RCDC’s. Based on a Boolean attribute I hide or make visible a tab of info about Room resources on the edit and view RCDC’s.  (You can’t do that to the create RCDC because the object doesn’t yet exist)

But, I would like to make room number on the Hidden tab to be required when the tab is visible, and not when the tab isn’t. Obviously I can’t do that on the create because the object doesn’t yet exist and so I can’t reference the Boolean attribute. So I just set the required property to true and figured it would work or not. – It does not work. The tab is still hidden until I click finish and then the tab is revealed and it insists on input to the field “The required field cannot be empty”.

Isn’t that just weird?

However, by binding the required property of the control to the same Boolean attribute as the visible property of the tab uses we don’t get the same issue. It keeps the tab hidden when it is not a room, but shows the tab when it is a room and requires those fields.

FIM 2010 R2 News

At Tech Ed Atlanta Brjann Brekkan and Mark Wahl discussed FIM 2010 R2 in a public forum – so here is a lot of info that is now in the public forum.

Mark covered the new items that will come out in R2:

1. Web Based Password reset (no need for a domain joined computer, no need to install Password Client no need for Active X, support for Firefox)
1. Although for integration with the GINA (the login screen) you still need to install the FIM Password Reset Client
2. Have the ability to mark QA gates as executing for everyone or only those coming through the extranet.
1. 
3. Considering adding Captcha or OTP gates to phones
2. Reporting
1. Depends on System Center Data Warehouse (SCDW)
1. But no separating licensing is required for SCDW
2. Reports
1. Membership Change Reports
2. Object History
1. Users
2. Groups
3. Sets
4. Requests
5. Policy Rules (MPRs)
3. MA – EZ MA – Andreas Kjellman covered this one at TEC

RSS feed for FIM Hotfixes

Now you can be informed about FIM 2010 hotfixes through an RSS newsfeed

http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/FIM2010_Hotfixes

Using FIM to manage BPOS/Office 365

Carol presented a solution to a very thorny problem – how to overcome the lack of delegation in BPOS. In BPOS a user is either an admin or a user. So she used FIM to provide the delegation. Very detailed, very complete solution. She illustrated some of the scripts she has posted on her blog such as http://www.wapshere.com/missmiis/a-script-to-create-sets-and-mprs-from-templates 

Well done Carol!

FIM 2010 reporting using SQL Server Reporting Services (Jeremy and Craig)

Jeremy and Craig had an interesting shoot out showing off their differing versions of reporting from FIM. Jeremy has an “agent” that he uses to pull the data out of FIM and store it in SQL, after which doing SSRS reports is not terribly difficult. Craig’s approach was to start off by creating a generic SSRS Data Processing extension for PowerShell, and then adjusted to pull data from FIM. Both approaches look very slick. Afterwards they explained how their efforts actually turned out to be quite complimentary. Two thumbs up gentlemen!

Creating Authentication Activities in FIM (Ikrima Elhassan)

This session at TEC was quite interesting. Ikrima presented quite a lot of material about how to extend FIM with your own authentication activities, demonstrating a OTP password reset approach.

Code is available at https://github.com/ikrima/Public-Development