I visited all the sposors at TEC and I particularly wanted to post about two of them as their products fit into the user provisioning and lifecycle sphere. This post is based on short demos and discussions with the company reps, so I can’t claim any knowledge about how well they would scale, or run in production, but I did think they’d be worth a closer look for the right projects.
Group ID Synchronize from imanami
This looked to me to be a good product for small to medium organisations (say up to a few thousand users) where AD users and groups need to be provisioned and updated based on information from a single data source, such as an HR database. There’s no metadirectory – objects are created and updated directly in AD. There’s a nice looking interface for creating your flow and provisioning rules, and if you want to do anything a bit more complicated you can insert vbscripts. And of course, as the product name suggests, there’s functionality based around groups – both auto-populated and user-managed. The interface looked intuitve and simple to use, and I think it would be a nice solution for companies that don’t need the full complexity of the IdM market-leader products.
EmpowerID from The Dot Net Factory
This product is a direct competitor to FIM 2010 and priced similarly. It brings in many of the key features of FIM – metadirectory, multiple data sources, password sync and reset, Sharepoint portal, workflow, de/provisioning, group management… It also natively includes features that FIM is sorely lacking – in particular decent reporting and the native ability to manage resources such as home folders, Exchange mailboxes and Sharepoint sites. The product comes with a long list of procedures and workflows already programmed out of the box, but you can also add your own. I was particularly impressed with the way they’d encorporated Windows Workflow Foundation directly into the product, allowing you to build your workflows right there in the interface, without have to muck around with Visual Studio, compiling and importing dll’s. This is an impressive looking product and I’d be interested to see how it performs in a large-scale environment.
