1dent1ty cHa0s

This was already picked up elsewhere whilst I was out on vacation but I still had to add my "way cool" for the extra detail. Thanks Darryl!

With RC1 Update 1 we can start to see some of the dedication the product group has been talking about over the past year to ensure greater scalability in large environments. With the new service partitions it allows you to rollout portals focused at specific user segments which addresses portal response issues that were rampant before. Addressing the performance perception from end users is critical and should not be undervalued as there is nothing that will sink a project quicker than poor reception from your user community. Terms like "sluggish", "slow", or phrases like "it timed out when I tried to do x" makes it quickly through management and all of the sudden your big investment is cast aside.

Mark my words, features like this will drive better long term adoption and uptake in enterprises.

The next bottleneck to address then becomes the single SQL Server instance which all of the service partitions run against; however, I doubt this will be addressed in this version of the product. Perhaps the ILM "3" candidate (still in early planning stages) will seek to address this by adding capabilities to partition the FIM Service Database as well. Until then, you need to scale UP your SQL Server investment for FIM 2010 Service Database.

Darryl Russi's Blog : Service Partitions - Multiple Middle Tiers, Request & Workflow Processing