OIM has a quite large list of of connectors but sometimes you need to interact with a target system that lacks a standard connector. One such example is TDS (Tivoli Directory Server).
TDS is used as the internal directory server in TIM and can also be used as a standard corporate directory or as the user directory for the IBM Tivoli Access Manager. It is a standard LDAP v3 compliant directory so in theory you should be able to use any of the LDAP connectors (AD, eDirectory and Sun JDS). I would generally not recommend trying to use the AD connector as it includes a lot of functionality that addresses peculiarities in AD but either the eDirectory or Sun JDS will work fine.
The problems that may force you to write a custom connector will often have more to do with the lack of functionality of the standard connectors than incompabilities between TDS and the connectors. The eDirectory and the JDS connectors have basically gotten minimal updating during the last four years so compared with the AD connector their functional depth is quite limited. One area where you may see compability issues is in the handling of roles and groups.
You may end up writing some custom logic in JNDI to complement the functionality of the standard connector which really isn't very complicated if you have some basic Java programming skills. An example implementation of a JNDI based connector can be found in the JNDI demo tool
Hi Martin,
ReplyDeleteGreat post once again. I just downloaded your JNDI demo tool to have a look. Nice. I never thought we can do a custom task like this to AD or even to Tivoli Directory. Thanks a lot.
Regards
Vijay Chinnasamy