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news from the identity management front

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10 August 2006 - 7:07pm
Submitted by: vscheuber

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i'm all excited about two new features that we have started r&d on for designer 2.0.

two weeks ago we started active r&d on snapshotting and staging. both are enterprise-class features that will greatly help everyone working with novell identity manager.

snapshotting will allow the user to take snapshots from a designer project either locally or, if she/he works in a project team, on a snapshot server. this will provide two main benefits: it will team-enable designer and will provide sophisticated backup and restore capabilities. i know that many users have begged for this and now i can say: we're working on it.

staging will support the user or a whole project team to take a solution from one stage to the next. all projects operate at least on two stages: test environment and production. some even take a three stage approach and devide development and test into two environments. the challenge has always been how to manage to get a finished and tested solution from the development and/or test servers into production without forgetting a switch here and a flag there and how to do it fast and efficient. staging will address this issue.

if you feel strongly about any of these two features, get a discussion going!

i almost forget to mention: we posted TID3351724 which contains the official list of fixes that were rolled into idm 3.0.1.




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Edwin's picture

That's real good news! My

Submitted by Edwin (not verified) on 11 August 2006 - 3:05am.

That's real good news!
My customer uses 3 environments (Test, Quality Assurance, Production) and of course I have my own VMWare as a fourth.

It's always a big problem to keep all the 15 driver 'synced' between those systems and copying them between the projects is just a big hassle.

Realy looking forward to this Designer solution!

Volker Scheuber's picture

Edwin, staging will help

Submitted by Volker Scheuber (not verified) on 11 August 2006 - 6:24am.

Edwin,

staging will help you exactly do that. give me some more information on your environment:

are your stages different in hardware configuration? I.e. very often we have seen a dev and test stage being setup on only one server each where as the production solution sits on three servers. how are your stages different?

i want to make sure our tool covers it all.

Edwin's picture

Volker, in this case both

Submitted by Edwin (not verified) on 13 August 2006 - 11:40pm.

Volker,

in this case both test and Quality assurance (QAS)exist of a single Solaris server with eDir, IDM 2.0.1 and NSure Audit which we try to keep on the same versions of these products...
Production exists of multiple Solaris servers but only 2 with IDM. One of them is the eDir Master and hosts all drivers except one. The second server is basically the backup one with one active driver.

Ideally it would be possible to also include my Own VM as a stage, this is a single Sles 9 server. So basically we would need the freedom to deploy to any server.

And then of course we would need some Versioning control in there as well ;)

Volker Scheuber's picture

Edwin, thanks for these

Submitted by Volker Scheuber (not verified) on 14 August 2006 - 8:59am.

Edwin,

thanks for these details. we will definitely be able to handle your scenario, including the VM as its own stage.
you will be able to deploy to any "real" environment from every stage, so you make the call where each stage lives in your environment.

Jesse Pretorius's picture

Totally off subject: Are

Submitted by Jesse Pretorius (not verified) on 31 August 2006 - 6:46am.

Totally off subject:

Are there any newer Visio stencils for IDM available anywhere? If not newer, where can I find the older 'Tao' stencils?

Volker Scheuber's picture

Jesse, i don't know whether

Submitted by Volker Scheuber (not verified) on 1 September 2006 - 9:43am.

Jesse,
i don't know whether there are newer stencils available but i will try to find you the old ones.

Leeland Artra's picture

I am working with the M4 2.0

Submitted by Leeland Artra (not verified) on 7 September 2006 - 9:52am.

I am working with the M4 2.0 release. Very, very nice.

A feature we are wishing we had is a "compare to archive" set of tools. I can compare what is in Designer to the running drivers.
But, if I want to compare what we had before to what we have now I can not.

I also would do hand stands if I could generate a "change document". I had the idea of generating the RTF (Word doc) for each
generation of our drivers, then use the Word feature for "merge documents with tracked changes" to create a document that
highlights the differences between the two versions of the doc (and hence the versions of Drivers).

This had limited success since the RTF document is not really generated using a good small set of named "styles". So the
differences turn out to be nearly the whole document instead of just the 2 or three changes to 4 of the 8 drivers.

Any ideas on how to compare and capture the results in something that can be published?

Volker Scheuber's picture

Leeland, thank you very

Submitted by Volker Scheuber (not verified) on 12 September 2006 - 2:04pm.

Leeland,

thank you very much for your feedback and ideas! i have forwarded your comments immediately to each of the respective engineers and we had first discussions on feasability.

at the moment i have no good alternative for you from what you already tried. thanks for surfacing this!

Volker Scheuber's picture

Jesse, i got the stencils

Submitted by Volker Scheuber (not verified) on 19 September 2006 - 6:25am.

Jesse,

i got the stencils you asked for. if you drop me an email, i will forward them to you.

Richard Seepaul's picture

I would not mind having

Submitted by Richard Seepaul (not verified) on 4 January 2007 - 2:52pm.

I would not mind having Visio Stencils for any Novell Product.

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