Policies enable you to customize the flow of information into and out of Novell eDirectory for a particular environment.
For example, one company might use the inetorgperson as the main user class, and another company might use User. To handle this, a policy is created that tells the Metadirectory engine what a user is called in each system. Whenever operations affecting users are passed between connected systems, Identity Manager applies the policy that makes this change.
Policies also create new objects, update attribute values, make schema transformations, define matching criteria, maintain Novell Identity Manager associations, and many other things.
For more information on policies, refer to the following: