Microsoft releases Identity Integration Server

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. says that the Identity Integration Server 2003 it released to manufacturing today represents more than just a name change for the product, which was formerly known as Metadirectory Services 2003.
Microsoft Identity Information Server (MIIS) 2003 goes beyond the functionality of a traditional metadirectory by adding features such as automatic account provisioning and password management to its existing ability to integrate user identity information across multiple account stores running on different systems, said Michael Stephenson, a lead product manager at Microsoft.
"This is a major revision to the product," said Jamie Lewis, CEO and research chair at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah. "They have started to build in the foundation for provisioning and password-management capabilities that increase the functionality of the product. It's something the whole market is doing. Directory and metadirectory services are evolving into a broader set of identity management tools and services."
Chicago-based law firm Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman, which has about 1,600 employees, has already begun to see benefits from the new functionality since it began deploying a release candidate of the product in late May, according to application development manager Alexander Diaz. Diaz said the firm began using Microsoft Metadirectory Services (MMS) with the goal of single entry for basic employee information, such as name, department and location, in some 20 different systems. The capabilities in the old MMS product were limited, he said.
"The previous system used a proprietary Web store for the metadirectory information. The new product leverages SQL Server, so it scales a lot more than the previous version," Diaz said. "You can store a lot more information, and you can deploy a lot more connectors without running into the limitation on the directory store. Because it's using the SQL back end as its data store and they redesigned the whole identity server, the server itself outperforms the old one."
Diaz said he also likes the fact that with MIIS, he can now use Microsoft programming languages, such as Visual Basic and C#, to provision accounts and extend capabilities to other Windows application programming interfaces (API). He can, for example, use Visual Basic .Net to access the Windows APIs to create user home directories and the necessary security to prevent unauthorized users from accessing them. Diaz said he can also write directly to APIs in a network fax application that the company uses, and more efficiently handle the renaming of accounts.
"Some of those things had to be handled manually by administrators in the past," Diaz said. "I'm eliminating a