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You're reading from Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook

Product typeBook

Published inAug 2012

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781849685368

Edition1st Edition

Tools

Microsoft Identity Manager

Concepts

Identity Management

Author (1)

Kent Nordstrom

Chapter 10. FIM Portal Customization

Using the FIM Portal as an administrator to manage users or as a self-service portal for end-users will likely mean you would like to make some changes to UI. These can be easy things such as changing the logo or more complex things such as changing how the forms look and behave.

In every FIM project I have been involved with, at least some changes have been made. So learning how to make adjustments, is in my opinion, a must.

I will not cover all the possible ways you have for making changes to the FIM Portal in this chapter, but rather give some examples of things I usually run into in my customer projects, and some tips and tricks around them. Check out http://aka.ms/CustomizeFIMPortal to get a more complete guide on how to change everything.

In this chapter, we will take a quick look at how to:

Modify the basic FIM Portal UI
Customize search scopes
Customize forms

Components of the UI

The Portal UI is composed of several different blocks, as described in the following screenshot:

If you have ever worked with SharePoint, you will see some familiar stuff. One thing to remember though is that the FIM Portal is not just another SharePoint site; you will realize this as soon as you start to look at, for example, the forms we use in FIM.

But many of the graphical changes we can make are the same as in SharePoint.

In the upper-right corner, we will find some familiar menus if we have worked with SharePoint.

If we go into Site Settings and click on the Site Theme option, we will see that FIM installed its own SharePoint theme called FIM, which is used by the FIM Portal site.

If you are thinking about trying to use another theme or trying to use this theme on other sites, forget it. I have made some tries in a few customer cases but have always realized the theme is quite specialized to use with the FIM Portal.

Note

If you are familiar with SharePoint, it would...

Portal Configuration

All projects I have worked on have made some changes to the Portal Configuration. If we look at the Portal Configuration, we find some common settings to change.

The three branding settings are almost always changed, but sometimes settings such as ListView Items per Page are changed as well. At the bottom of the Portal Configuration form, you also have the Time Zone setting of the FIM Portal.

So what if we would like to change the logo in the upper-left corner that is Branding Left Image? We'll first take a look at the current value. It is ~/_layouts/images/MSILM2/logo.png.

The ~ sign in the beginning is for showing that it is relative to the SharePoint site. The physical path of this file is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\MSILM2.

So basically you have two options: you can either replace the logo.png file in the folder, or you can change the URL pointing to the image.

But after changing the setting, you will still...

Navigation Bar Resource

Navigation bar resources are basically links we would like to expose in the Navigation section, on the left side of the Portal.

Usually the URL points to a page within the FIM Portal, but you can also add external URLs if you like.

The Order and Parent Order attributes decide where they appear in the Navigation bar.

But if you look at one of them, for example the Distribution Groups (DGs) navigation bar resource, it has something called Usage Keyword.

The value BasicUI in the Usage Keyword attribute means that the Navigation Bar Resource object will show up for all the users entering the Portal and not just for the administrators. This is why the Portal looks different when a user looks at it.

The Usage Keyword is a multivalued string attribute, with each entry delimited by a new line.

Portal administrators can use this attribute to customize which set of users can see which set of Navigation Bar resources, by following the given steps:

Create a set of Navigation Bar...

Search scopes

In many of the interfaces of the FIM Portal there is an option to do searches.

If we go to Users, for example, we can search within All Users, and the result will be All Users and some of the properties of the users in columns.

This is an example of a search scope. The name of the search scope is All Users. Let's take a look at this search scope.

Click on the Search Scope link in the Administration section of the FIM Portal, and search for All Users to find this particular search scope.

Usage Keyword

On the General tab we see the familiar Usage Keyword attribute again. Besides having the same purpose as the Usage Keyword attribute on the Navigation Bar Resource object, that is deciding who will be able to use the search scope, the Usage Keyword attribute on search scopes also decides where the search scope will appear.

The default list of keywords is described in the following table:

Filter Permissions

Filter Permissions are not so much about UI change, but they will affect how the UI behaves. Filter Permissions define which attributes we can use when defining filters for Sets and Groups.

Let's say you have added a new attribute to the schema called Employee Status and would like to create a set with all the users that have Employee Status = Active. Well this cannot be done, unless you add Employee Status to the correct Filter Permission object.

If we would like non-administrator users to be able to define this filter, we will need to add it to the Non-Administrator Filter Permission object. This is, however, not very common unless users can create dynamic groups.

Typically, the filters are changed by the administrators, after which we need to add the attribute to the Allowed Attributes list in Administrator Filter Permission.

RCDC

RCDC is short for Resource Control Display Configuration. Don't ask me who came up with the name or why it got this name, but this is a form. Every form used in FIM to manage any kind of information is defined in what is called an RCDC.

All over the Internet, it is easy to find discussions on how to create and modify the RCDCs. I will give you some examples of typical changes I make to the RCDCs in my customer projects, but for a complete reference on the structure of the RCDCs, refer to http://aka.ms/RCDCRef.

Let's say we want to change how the form we get when looking at a user object looks. You then need to modify the RCDCs as per the following steps:

If you search for User RCDCs, you will find three. You will find three because we can define different forms depending on what kind of operation we are doing. So we have one for create, one for edit, and one for view. If we change the one for editing, it is most likely that we would also like to change the one for viewing, in a similar...

Summary

It is not easy to make changes to the FIM Portal, to make it better fitted for the tasks we will use it for. Just remember that UI changes are among the last things we do in an FIM project. First of all we need to make sure it works and then we can think about how we can change the UI to make the operation and usage of FIM easier.

The forms used in FIM have some limitations, but I usually try to convince my customers to use the FIM Portal first, before building a custom interface. In most cases, the cost for building the custom interface is too high compared to the gain in usability.

In this chapter I have showed some examples of typical changes made to the UI of the FIM Portal. We have seen how navigation bar resources and search scopes can dramatically change the look and operation of the FIM Portal depending on who the user is. I have also showed how difficult it is to modify the forms and RCDCs used in the FIM Portal.

As we have discussed in this chapter, it is quite common to customize...

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Author (1)

Kent Nordstrom

Kent Nordström wrote his first lines of code in the late 70s so he's been working with IT for quite some time now. When Microsoft released its Windows 2000 operating system he started a close relationship with them that has continued since. For many years Kent has been working part time as a sub-contractor to Microsoft Consulting Services and has been doing many of the implementations of FIM and its predecessors for multinational companies and large organizations in Sweden. Apart from FIM, Kent is also well known within the community for his knowledge around Forefront TMG, Forefront UAG and PKI. Find out more by visiting his blog on http://konab.com.
Read more about Kent Nordstrom

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Keyword	Page where the Search Scope will appear
Global	Homepage When you use this Usage Keyword...

Keyword

Page where the Search Scope will appear

Global

Homepage

When you use this Usage Keyword...