SAP TechEd: Preview

I'm here in Las Vegas, Nevada for SAP TechEd 2012 and I could not be happier. It's looking like quite the busy week of IDM related training.  Attendees are arriving and I've already seen a few people I know from SAP, past projects and the greater IDM Community.  From what I've already heard we're in for a week of exciting learning, future product direction and late breaking functionality in the product. In addition to working with IDM this week, I'll be attending several sessions on the SSO solution that SAP purchased from SECUDE last year.  Now that a year has gone by, the product should be fully integrated into the SAP universe and I'm very interested in learning more about it. I was strangely surprised to see very few, if any, SAP GRC solutions in the session listings.  Hopefully, I'll be able to find out what's going on with that. On the other hand, there will be several Virtual Directory Server related sessions which should be quite informative about connecting to various systems and web services.

I'm sure that we will hear the latest news about SAP IDM 7.2.  Service Pack 6 is due shortly and I'm looking forward to getting a few rumors confirmed.  Probably the one to be confirmed first will be around DB2 support. This will be very good for IBM shops where DB2 is used to the exclusion of the other supported databases in IDM, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.  This adds greater flexibility to my thoughts in choosing an IDM solution, as one can now expand the database criteria and will answer the pleas for support from many SAP customers that want to get involved with IDM. There are also some rumors about new and improved tools along the lines of the Configration Analyzer.


Also rumored are some MMC improvements, although I have not yet gotten even a rumor of when a redesigned administrative console will be available, although I am assured that it is indeed on the list. I'm hoping to get some information on this during the SAP  NetWeaver ID Management - Latest Functionality and Demo session scheduled for tomorrow.  Hopefully, I'll have some exciting news for the SAP IDM community.

I'm looking forward to seeing / learning / connecting and reconnecting during the week.  Odds are you'll find me at the various IDM and SSO sessions this week if you're here.  Please feel free to introduce yourselves.  I'd like to try and organize some sort of IDM meet up this week, maybe a drink or two one night.  I've received some interest in this.  If you have not contacted me yet, please leave a comment or email me privately.

The Tao of IDM

The best soldier does not attack. The superior fighter succeeds without violence. The greatest conqueror wins without struggle. The most successful manager leads without dictating. This is intelligent non aggressiveness. This is called the mastery of men. 

So why would I lead an Identity Management blog entry with a quote from the Tao Te Ching? Basically it sums up a recent issue I had in my current project.


As a part of this project, I am helping to get a young engineer familiar with IDM.  Working together we needed to create a query that would return only specific types of users for an IDM export Job.  I explained the basic process for executing the export and watched him work on various queries to return the correct users, while advising him about database structures and useful techniques. As an elaborate query began to take shape it was starting to look way too complicated.  I started thinking that there had to be a better way to accomplish our task.


Then I remembered that since we were doing a "To Database" task we could specify the Identity Store as the source and used the built in editor to build the correct query.  It took seconds to build and we quickly checked the query by doing a copy/paste to Microsoft SQL Server.  It worked perfectly and we were up and running.


Here's an example of the query that we created:

So what's the takeaway on this?  Look to see what the system can do rather than build something from the outside. At the very least, use the tools to build the query and then customize it (just remember that using an external query editor on the edited query make using the built in tool not work). 


And here's how easy it was to generate the query:

There's no need to reinvent the wheel

Errors when deploying a Service Pack

One of the interesting things about the move from MaXware Identity Center to SAP NetWeaver Identity Management (Or even NetWeaver Identity Management 7.0 to 7.1) is that we've moved away from the PHP / SMARTY presentation engine to SAP NetWeaver and WebDynpro. I'm not going to go into the pros and cons of this change as I've pretty much found it to be a wash. However, usually one of the better things about using NetWeaver is that it makes the update process quite a bit easier.

Notice, I said usually....

Every now and then when setting up a new environment I get all kinds of crazy dependency errors when deploying the new SCA file. This drove me absolutely crazy for a while until an experienced NetWeaver hand pointed out what the issue was.

I do most of my development work using a VM on my Laptop that uses NW Developer Workplace 7.0. It seems the dependency issue was coming about when I was trying to deploy a SCA file for NetWeaver 7.1. Once I  tried deploying the correct SCA file it went much better.

For the record:

• The correct file for 7.0 is: IDMIC05_0-10007482.SCA
• The correct file for 7.1 is: IDMIC05_0-10007483.SCA

I'm sure that this is documented somewhere, but I figured I'd share it for general reference.
 
I'll be posting a wrap up of SAP TechEd 2010 later tonight or tomorrow.