Interesting post on SAP's IDM Blog. Basically. the author is stating that if you want to plan your SAP implementation in a strategic manner, you must use IDM and not CUA (Central User Administration). This is a nice follow up to SCI104 from TechEd, which I reported about as well.
Nice to see that SAP is starting to get a little more aggressive here. If you are a SAP Shop and rely on CUA, it might be time to start thinking about how you plan to deploy. Additionally, if you're a SAP Shop on SUN IDM, and not too keen on a switch to Oracle, SAP IDM might be the something to look into!
As always, leave a comment or email me if you have questions about what needs to happen in these implementations!
Showing posts with label SAP TechEd 2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SAP TechEd 2010. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Some quick reads in SAP IDM and IdM in general.
Reporting, Metrics, Audit, whatever you want to call it, relies on being able to extract information from your identity management systems. This article is a brief discussion on the topic. I was fortunate to meet one of the authors, Gerlinde, during TechEd last year.
It's also nice to know our market is growing!
It's also nice to know our market is growing!
Friday, October 22, 2010
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)
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!
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 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!
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
SAP TechEd on Wednesday, October 20th
As promised, I'm going to follow up on some of the challenges that Gregg Dippold had commented on. To the best of my knowledge, all of the information that I have reported here is public as of TechEd. I have chosen not to share some information as I felt that it was still to tentative to report. All of this information, of course, subject to change.
The short answer is: SAP NetWeaver Identity Management 7.2 is a huge leap forward. It will be more customizable, have better tools for managing roles and connect to more systems than ever before. So here's Gregg's list of challenges and what I've learned so far.
Challenge 1: Self Service is Not Intuitive for Unsophisticated Users
Version 7.2 will be adding additional functionality to create custom user interfaces using an Open API. It might not make it into the initial release, but look for it in one of the 7.2 Service packs.
Challenge 2: Fragmented Documentation
Don't know about this one, but I can say that the documentation has been getting steadily better, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
Challenge 3: Limitations in the Staging Environment
I think we're all aware of some of the limitations in the Import/Export. Look for some changes that will make transferring configurations between environments much easier. Among these will be an interface from the Web UI to export the entire configuration including repositories to a single XML file. Also to be included in 7.2 is a configuration analyzer which will review the entire configuration and check for objects 7.1 that will not work in 7.2 and do some basic checking for inefficient practices (such as queries that use aValue rather than SearchValue.
Note: I forgot to add that this utility will also export associated VDS configurations as well.
Challenge 4: Job Customization Frequently Requires Custom JavaScript
I don't know that this can ever really go away, as there needs to be some mechanism for implementing transformations of attributes and back end processing. To make things more interesting, we'll also see more use of the extension framework which will be JAVA based and open up some new and exciting possibilities. We can also expect to see some changes to the standard provisioning framework that will make connectivity to SAP and non-SAP systems a bit easier.
Challenge 5: Few Useful Reports Available in Default Installation
This could also be a big item as 7.2 will now talk to the Business Warehouse. From what I saw during the presentation these reports will be much better than the previous Jasper and Crystal based reports.
That's about it for the moment. Heading to a session on VDS shortly. Hopefully, I'll get some more information that I'm free to share.
The short answer is: SAP NetWeaver Identity Management 7.2 is a huge leap forward. It will be more customizable, have better tools for managing roles and connect to more systems than ever before. So here's Gregg's list of challenges and what I've learned so far.
Challenge 1: Self Service is Not Intuitive for Unsophisticated Users
Version 7.2 will be adding additional functionality to create custom user interfaces using an Open API. It might not make it into the initial release, but look for it in one of the 7.2 Service packs.
Challenge 2: Fragmented Documentation
Don't know about this one, but I can say that the documentation has been getting steadily better, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
Challenge 3: Limitations in the Staging Environment
I think we're all aware of some of the limitations in the Import/Export. Look for some changes that will make transferring configurations between environments much easier. Among these will be an interface from the Web UI to export the entire configuration including repositories to a single XML file. Also to be included in 7.2 is a configuration analyzer which will review the entire configuration and check for objects 7.1 that will not work in 7.2 and do some basic checking for inefficient practices (such as queries that use aValue rather than SearchValue.
Note: I forgot to add that this utility will also export associated VDS configurations as well.
Challenge 4: Job Customization Frequently Requires Custom JavaScript
I don't know that this can ever really go away, as there needs to be some mechanism for implementing transformations of attributes and back end processing. To make things more interesting, we'll also see more use of the extension framework which will be JAVA based and open up some new and exciting possibilities. We can also expect to see some changes to the standard provisioning framework that will make connectivity to SAP and non-SAP systems a bit easier.
Challenge 5: Few Useful Reports Available in Default Installation
This could also be a big item as 7.2 will now talk to the Business Warehouse. From what I saw during the presentation these reports will be much better than the previous Jasper and Crystal based reports.
That's about it for the moment. Heading to a session on VDS shortly. Hopefully, I'll get some more information that I'm free to share.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Reporting from TechEd
I'm here at SAP TechEd, in Las Vegas. Looking forward to a great week of presentations, learning, catching up with some old friends and hopefully making some new ones.
Gregg Dippold, over at the NetWeaver Identity Management blog, has posted a number of challenges that he feels exist in NetWeaver IDM 7.1. For the most part I agree with him. During the week, I'll be posting about how SAP plans to address Gregg's challenges.
Otherwise, I'm going to be looking at what's in store for the future of NW IDM and how it can help people over versions 7.2 and 7.3.
Gregg Dippold, over at the NetWeaver Identity Management blog, has posted a number of challenges that he feels exist in NetWeaver IDM 7.1. For the most part I agree with him. During the week, I'll be posting about how SAP plans to address Gregg's challenges.
Otherwise, I'm going to be looking at what's in store for the future of NW IDM and how it can help people over versions 7.2 and 7.3.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Couple of Random Things
I've not had the chance to write much lately, as I've been rather busy on a project in the Southeast US. I've got a couple of nice tips that I hope to share in the next couple of days.
However, I do have a couple of quick things that I'd like to share.
First off, I will be at SAP TechEd, which will be in a little under two weeks from now, in Las Vegas. If you're going to be there, please leave me a comment or let me know via a comment, LinkedIn, XING, or any other way that works for you. There's going to be a lot covered for NetWeaver IDM and I plan to report on it. Would not mind having a little after hours round table.
Also I've been picked up on the Planet Identity blog. Looking forward to being a part of that conversation as well.
However, I do have a couple of quick things that I'd like to share.
First off, I will be at SAP TechEd, which will be in a little under two weeks from now, in Las Vegas. If you're going to be there, please leave me a comment or let me know via a comment, LinkedIn, XING, or any other way that works for you. There's going to be a lot covered for NetWeaver IDM and I plan to report on it. Would not mind having a little after hours round table.
Also I've been picked up on the Planet Identity blog. Looking forward to being a part of that conversation as well.
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