Geographically Visualizing your workforce using Microsoft Identity Manager, xMatters and Power BI

30th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

In the last couple of weeks I’ve posted about visualizing relationships of data from Microsoft Identity Manager using Power BI. Earlier this week I posted about building a Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manger to integrate with xMatters.
In this post I combine data from the last two in order to allow us to visualise the geographic office locations for an organisation and then summary data about it (how many employees are located there, and what departments).… [Keep reading] “Geographically Visualizing your workforce using Microsoft Identity Manager, xMatters and Power BI”

Building a FIM/MIM Management Agent for xMatters

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago one of my customers had a requirement to provision and manage identities into xMatters. The xMatters API Documentation looked straight-forward and I figured it would be pretty quick to knock up an PowerShell Management Agent.
The identification of users (People) in xMatters was indeed pretty quick. I was quickly able to enumerate all users (that had initially been seeded independent of FIM/MIM) and join them to corresponding users in the MetaVerse.… [Keep reading] “Building a FIM/MIM Management Agent for xMatters”

Graphically Visualizing Identity Hierarchy and Relationships

24th of November, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Almost 15 years ago Microsoft released Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003. Microsoft also released a couple of Resource Toolkits for MIIS to assist customers and IT Integrators’ implement the product as up to that time it’s predecessor (Microsoft Metadirectory Services) was only available as part of a Microsoft Consulting engagement.
At the same time Microsoft provided a Beta product – Microsoft PolyArchy Server. For someone who’s brain is wired in highly visually way, this was a wow moment.… [Keep reading] “Graphically Visualizing Identity Hierarchy and Relationships”

MIM configuration version control with Git

8th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

The first question usually asked when something goes wrong: What changed?
Some areas of FIM/MIM make it easy to answer that question, some more difficult. If the Reporting Services components haven’t been installed (pretty common), history within the Portal/Service is only retained for 30 days by default, but also contains all data changes not just configuration changes. So, how do we track configuration change?
I was inspired by colleague Darren Robinson’s post “Automate the nightly backup of your Development FIM/MIM Sync and Portal Servers Configuration“, but wanted more detail, automatic differences, and handy visualisation.… [Keep reading] “MIM configuration version control with Git”

Display Microsoft Identity Manager Sync Engine Statistics in the MIM Portal

15th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

In the Microsoft / Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service Manager under Tools we have a Statistics Report. This gives a break down of each of the Management Agents and the Connectors on each MA.
I had a recent requirement to expose this information for a customer but I didn’t want them to have to connect to the Synchronization Server (and be given the permissions to allow them to). So I looked into another way of providing a subset of this information in the MIM Portal itself.  … [Keep reading] “Display Microsoft Identity Manager Sync Engine Statistics in the MIM Portal”

UPDATED: Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager

10th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Earlier this week I posted this blog post that showed a working example of using a custom Pwned Password FIM/MIM Management Agent to flag a boolean attribute in the MIM Service to indicate whether a users password is in the pwned password dataset or not. If you haven’t read that post this won’t make a lot of sense, so read that then come back.
The solution when receiving a new password for a user (via Microsoft Password Change Notification Service) was checking against the Have I Been Pwned API.… [Keep reading] “UPDATED: Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager”

Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager

8th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Update: An element of this solution details checking passwords online (using the Have I Been Pwned API). Troy explains succinctly in his blog-post announcing the pwned passwords list why this is a bad idea. If you are looking to implement the concept I detail in this post then WE STRONGLY recommend using a local copy of the pwned password list.
THIS POST HERE details using a local SQL Database to hold the Pwned Passwords Datasets and the change to the Management Agent to query the SQL DB instead of the HIBP API.  … [Keep reading] “Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager”

Integration of Microsoft Identity Manager with Azure Platform-as-a-Service Services

14th of June, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Overview

This isn’t an out of the box solution. This is a bespoke solution that takes a number of elements and puts them together in a unique way. I’m not expecting anyone to implement this specific solution (but you’re more than welcome to) but to take inspiration from it to implement solutions relevant to your environment(s). This post supports a presentation I did to The MIM Team User Group on 14 June 2017.
This post describes a solution that;

  • Leverages an Azure WebApp (NodeJS) to present a simple website.
… [Keep reading] “Integration of Microsoft Identity Manager with Azure Platform-as-a-Service Services”

MIM/FIM Full Sync of select objects only

26th of May, 2017 / / 2 Comments

As I detailed in my previous blog here, sometimes there is a need to perform a full synchronization of just a select set of objects in the MIM/FIM Synchronization Service. In my case, it was to all the Synchronization Rules which helped resolve my issue which required a selected Full Synchronization performed. For this customer’s FIM environment, I manually performed the Preview/Full Synchronization on 51 objects as I just needed it done. My colleague Darren Robinson suggested I look at scripting it using the ‘Lithnet PowerShell Module for FIM/MIM Synchronization Service’ located here.… [Keep reading] “MIM/FIM Full Sync of select objects only”

Using the Lithnet PowerShell Modules to generate full object metadata FIM/MIM HTML Reports

11th of May, 2017 / / No Comments


How many times have you wanted a consolidated report out of FIM/MIM for an object? What connectors does it have, what are the values of the attributes, which Management Agent contributed the value(s) and when? Individually of course you can get that info using the Metaverse Search and looking at the object in MIM Portal. But what if you wanted it all with a single query? This blog post provides an approach to doing just that.… [Keep reading] “Using the Lithnet PowerShell Modules to generate full object metadata FIM/MIM HTML Reports”