Each employee's attributes from the e-mail system and the human resources database are imported into the connector space through respective management agents.
One of the goals of the identity management is to establish and support authoritative sources of information for every known attribute and to preserve data integrity according to predetermined business rules.
The product is extensible through the use of the .NET Framework, which allows developers and network administrators to extend out-of-the-box capabilities and perform complex tasks.
Future releases of MIIS/ILM are expected to be x64 only; x86 support expected to be dropped, following suite of Exchange Server Public Release Candidate (RC) version for Identity Lifecycle Manager '2' is available now (December 2008)[5] The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is a new back-end dependency of ILM '2' MIIS 2003, Enterprise Edition, includes support for a wide variety of identity repositories including the following.
Application : PeopleSoft, SAP AG products, ERP1, telephone switches PBX, XML- and Directory Service Markup Language DSML-based systems Database : Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle RDBMS, IBM Informix, dBase, IBM Db2 File-based : DSMLv2, LDIF, Comma-separated values CSV, delimited, fixed width, attribute value pairs Other: MIIS provides developers with well defined framework to create additional management agents (in any .NET Framework languages currently available on the market) that are not available out-of-the box.
Microsoft itself as well as third party vendors provide a wide array of additional management agents, such as OpenLDAP, IBM UniData, PeopleSoft, Windows Live ID/Hotmail, MySQL etc.
Standardization in the service provisioning space would benefit consumers and assist in avoiding costly lock-in to proprietary systems.