Tuesday, March 02, 2010

FIM 2010 Released To Manufacturing

It's finally here, FIM 2010 has been released to manufacturing and is now available to TAP and RDP customers while media will likely be available by the April timeframe. You can download the evaluation version here now:

The official announcement was made today at the 2010 RSA Conference in San Francisco during Scott Charney's keynote. I would also encourage you to sign-up for the upcoming TechNet webcasts on FIM.

History

What is now known as FIM 2010 had a long and challenging path to RTM – it started in concept as the successor to MIIS codenamed Gemini – originally scheduled to ship in the "Longhorn" wave, focused on process integration services, including rich workflow, centralized auditing and reporting, codeless provisioning, self-entitlement management and a self-service platform; this was the first time we saw the possibility of adding declarative provisioning, self-service password reset or workflow to the product but these things were on the drawing board as early as 2005. Later on, the efforts were crystallized under the Raven concept and emphasized self-service but both this and the Gemini names were eventually dropped for ILM "2" after MIIS was rebranded as Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007.

By the time the 2006 Directory Experts Conference had rolled around, the concepts had begun to take shape and for the first time I was treated to an architectural futures deck presented by Bobby Gill. Many of the key items conceptualized back in 2005 and 2006 are present in FIM 2010. While auditing features were cut, the plumbing is present in FIM allowing Microsoft Partners, ISV's and future efforts to begin taking advantage of the request and ERE/DRE data present in the system.

When the delay to ship ILM "2" until Q1 2010 was announced at the 2009 TEC Conference, it really hit hard but was ultimately the right decision. The delay gave the product group an entire year to nail down some challenging performance goals and opened up a wealth of opportunities for valuable feedback. Feedback from the TAP and RDP-Lite programs essentially allowed companies to deploy early on RC bits in order to test core functionality and yet delay official licensing until after the product RTM'd. All of the RC participants helped to make the FIM RTM a solid release.

So, for extra credit, who can tell me what the original acronym and term was for the engine theme inspired group management system? It later evolved into what we now know of as the Set->MPR->WF processing engine.

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