Forefront Identity Manager + Lotus Notes
At Zetetic we do a lot of work for our clients with Microsoft's identity management stack: Active Directory, AD Federation Services, Forefront Identity Manager 2010, and its predecessors Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 and Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003. FIM is a great tool, but--perhaps unsurprisingly--its connector to Lotus Notes has always come up a bit short because:
- It can only talk to the Domino Names and Address Book with predefined fields and behaviors
- It's limited to exactly one running Notes management agent (MA) at a time
- It has a tendency to crash the FIM Synchronization Service, usually requiring a reboot, when the Notes API gets out of whack
- Microsoft only officially supports a few legacy versions of the Notes client and server
(It's also impossible to prevent the standard Notes MA from complaining about replication-save conflicts or incomplete records, which then foul up the delta import process, but I digress...)
Having worked for years in the Notes and Domino development arena before switching full-time to C#, it seemed only natural to build a MA that bridges the gap between the many, many real-world business uses of Notes databases and FIM / ILM, while at the same time keeping the large, complex Notes client API out of the FIM server process.
Our solution to this problem is a two-parter:
1. A backend Windows service that manages all native access to the Notes API, and exposes a facade of Notes sessions, databases, documents, and the Notes Certification Authority, via .NET 2 TCP Remoting, and,
2. An Extensible MA for FIM / ILM that communicates with the .NET Remoting service to implement FIM's import and export operations.
The result is a FIM agent that uses only .NET managed code, moving all the native Notes stuff into a separate process--or even better, a separate host. Upgrading or moving FIM then no longer means dealing with the Notes client, or whether the 64-bit FIM process will have trouble with 32-bit Notes, or even trying to find the older editions of Notes that the FIM product supports.
We think this solution is an ideal fit for any FIM / ILM customer with Notes business databases or identity infrastructure in their environment because it greatly extends FIM's reach to read and update Notes databases, while also providing a serious boost in reliability. It's tremendously useful for application and messaging migration, easy to set up, and we provide full support to get your FIM to Notes and Domino integration configured and running.
For more information: Zetetic Management Agent for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino
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