Thursday, February 11, 2010

FIM2010 RC1.3 – Update 3 Good and Bad

FIM RC1 Update 3 has been out for awhile now and there has been some excellent coverage of the additional functionality that it brings:

One of the unsung heroes of Update 3 is a feature we have been asking for since RC0, Request Object Expiration. This process is finally available in Update 3 but in getting to Update 3 you may be in a small minority of people, myself included, that encountered problems during the database upgrade process. There is a bug on connect tracking this here:

I didn't see this error directly, I encountered a failure, retried the upgrade, and then it "worked". Upon further examination I began to suspect that it did not actually apply any of the database upgrades. I would suggest looking at the following thread to see if any of these issues are affecting you:

Specifically, my response here:

Ahh, you've encountered the same issue that I did - upgrade fails initially, subsequent updates complete (due to the version number being incremented incorrectly) but the database upgrade failed to apply updates to the MPR's.  In my case I can't start with a clean database, I have to upgrade otherwise I'll lose months worth of work.

I am still searching for a fix - best I can tell you is restore back to Update 2 and try your upgrade again. The partial update problem will manifest in the following manners:

  • Access Denied errors when attempting to Create, Modify or Delete MPR's
  • You will not see the new attribute in the schema - "Management Policy Rule Type", nor is it bound to the user object
  • You do not have the 4th FIM SQL job - FIM_DeleteExpiredSystemObjectsJob
  • SELECT * FROM FIMService.fim.Version will return '5' (the version for Update 3)

If you are encountering these issues, please go and register at the bug listed above.

Expiring Request Objects

It was my quest for the FIM_DeleteExpiredSystemObjectsJob that led me to suspect something was wrong and not finding the additional schema updates clinched it. In any case, applying Update 3 will finally clean out all of the expired Request objects that have been accumulating in your database. I'll follow-up with a more in-depth look at how you can control this process and tune it for your lab versus your production environments.

Set Restrictions

Another disappointment in Update 3 is losing the ability to nest Group Membership into a Set for the purposes of delegating rights within the portal. I cover this in the following Connect bug, so if you agree, please vote this up and add your own testimonials or business cases to help prioritize a fix.

Improved Error Reporting

One of my "jump up and do the happy dance" moments was finally seeing this screen after getting the failed-creation-via-web-services error:

WHOO HOO!

Now we are only a few clicks away from a meaningful error message and we don't have to go digging through logs to get it. :)

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