Diary of an Identity Project

We were chatting last week about what people actually understand when they hear the term 'identity management', and after asking a few people and carrying out a quick straw poll we have decided to expand on our thoughts on the subject.

To go a step further we have also decided to publish a diary of an identity project that we are just about to engage with so that we can pass on tips and tricks and give everyone an idea of what we mean by 'identity management'.

Of course, this will only be one aspect of idm, and there are many more, and yes, we do those as well!

For now though, the engagement we will be describing has a number of phases and deliverables, but the main deliverable is to synchronise a SQL database with Active Directory so that the latest information in the SQL database is always used to update AD and to keep it up to date.

Interestingly enough, the database itself isn't a HR database, and so it isn't necessarily authoritative when it comes to user accounts and numbers of accounts. What it is authoritative for is a number of key attributes such as phone number, address, company, department, title, and some others that we'll use and populate into extensionAttributes.

Before all this can start though, we have a different problem to overcome, and this involves out of date AD account information. More on this tomorrow when we have agreed how we want to address the problem!

Phil