Final report from Las Vegas

Sorry to say I'm wrapping my my stay here in Las Vegas.  It's been a great time to catch up with some of my friends from Trondheim Labs and SAP Consulting.  Also a pleasure to meet some folks that I've communicated with only by email and SDN from the RIG and SAP Waldorf.

I'm going to hit on two main items in this post. Best Practices and CUA.

I attended a great best practices session which talked about a number of things, most of which are fairly obvious (but still bears repeating) and a couple of interesting items.  (Emphasis is mine)

• Approach the project from the business standpoint, not from IT
• Successful IDM efforts encapsulate both technology and process, so address the initiative as a Program, not a project
• Executive sponsorship is a must
• Start with data cleansing
• Don't think that all roles need to be identified right away.  Set up the roles that are most critical and will have the biggest impact. (To be honest, I had not really thought about that one before and it makes a whole lot of sense.)

The other significant presentation I attended was on CUA.

The CUA picture has been murky ever since the acquisition of MaXware.  It's going away, it's staying, it's on maintenance... Well, you get the picture.

Based on recent reports from SAP, I think we can safely assume that it's on life support. CUA will not be further developed, and even experienced CUA hands are endorsing the use of NetWeaver Identity Management.

That's not to say that IDM is the perfect replacement for CUA.  It would seem that a fair amount of development is needed to have IDM do everything that CUA does.  However, the good news is that based on the way Identity Management works, that development will not be huge. 

Based on what I saw, organizations should begin planning on moving CUA operations to IDM, even if they are using another Identity Management system. One of the things that was established about NetWeaver Identity Management is the fact that it is the only system that can offer complete provisioning to both the ABAP and JAVA stacks for SAP.  I know that there are many partners to SAP  that offer connectivity, but I think only SAP will be able to offer a holistic approach to provisioning, particularly when provisioning to CRM and SRM. This is because the Provisioning framework that comes with NetWeaver Identity Management offers the only connectors that will work with both Technical and Business roles.

So to wrap up the coverage of TechEd, I think we can safely assume that NetWeaver IDM is evolving quite nicely and that it is in a position to gain greater acceptance from the SAP community as a whole.

As always, feel free to contact me with your NetWeaver Identity Management questions and thoughts.  I am, of course available for assessment and consulting projects.  Feel free to contact me at matt (-at-) cticorp (-dot-) com, for more information or check out the CTI website!