Chapter 4. MIM Service Configuration

In this chapter, we will look at different pieces of the MIM Service component. You will learn that many of the MIM Service components work hand-in-hand with one another. MIM Service provides a web service API along with a customizable web portal for user and policy management.

Here's what we will discuss in this chapter:

• MIM Service request processing

• The MIM Service Management Agent

• Understanding the portal and UI

MIM Service request processing

The AD and HR (SQL Server) MAs only give the synchronization engine the possibility of talking to these data sources. For MIM to apply codeless logic to the data flow, we need to use a special MA that connects the MIM Synchronization service to the MIM Service interface.

Before we talk about the MIM MA (referred to as the FIM MA by the product), its dependencies, and what is needed to get things flowing through the system, we need to understand some of the technology's mechanics. Before we dive a bit deeper into the request overview, we want to touch upon and remind you about the fact that in FIM/MIM, we have three main phases:

• Authentication

• Authorization

• Action

If you have worked with FIM in the past, you may have seen this graphic many times, but we feel this is an important visualization of the topic discussed:

The MIM request pipeline starts with the request object creation, then the Management Policy Rule evaluation. The authentication workflow(s) are next...

The MIM Service Management Agent

We will make some schema changes as we expand MIM to suit the needs of The Financial Company. There is one attribute that we change in most implementations: the EmployeeType attribute.

Before you start changing the service schema, you should have a look at http://bit.ly/MIMServiceSchema.

Note

In MIM Service, as in many other products, modifying the schema in the wrong way might stop it from working and require you to do a total rebuild of your environment.

The EmployeeType attribute is commonly used to store information that governs many policies. There is usually a big difference between being a contractor and an employee, for example. And every company has its own values. If you take a look at the earlier part of this chapter, you will see that in the HR database at The Financial Company, there are two different values in HRType for person objects. The values are Employee and Contractor.

If we look at a user in the MIM portal and the values we can assign to...

Understanding the portal and UI

Let's look at the basic structure of the portal:

The layout of the MIM portal is broken up into five major sections, as follows:

• The banner and logo (1): This section is typically where you would put your own company branded logo. Note that on the left-hand side, there is a Microsoft Identity Manager image, and on the right-hand side panel, it is grayed out, indicating that it too can be configured. In the administration portal configuration section of the site, you will see the branding left and right image settings along with other configuration items, such as caching and the global time zone setting.

• The navigation bar (2): This section is the vertical menu on the left-hand side and is controlled by navigation bar resources. We will configure the navigation bar later on and take a look at how we can affect this view:

  

  If we look at this area, we will see that Distribution Groups (DGs) is a parent item and My DG Memberships and My DGs are both child items,...

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at many areas of the service and portal. We looked at the request processing, the management policy, and also what included custom activities are; we will use these later on, and in chapters related to user management and group management, this will be important. And, of course, we also discussed self-service password reset.

We looked at the MIM Service Management Agent, the creation of the Management Agent, the default rules that are needed in order to successfully create the Management Agent, and the filtering of the building accounts that is required.

The biggest area of this chapter that we focused on is understanding the portal and UI, as this is fundamental to understanding MIM Service and portal when you run into it issues down the road. We outlined in this chapter the portal configuration, the navigation bar resources, and search scopes, and also discussed filter permissions and a little bit about what an RCDC is. Then, we provided a sample custom...