OIM 11g: Approval Workflow Orchestration with BPEL

In OIM pre 11g you were basically forced to implement decently complex approval workflow in Java code as the built in workflow editor simply didn't support more complex workflows. Coding the approval workflow was not a big problem if you had basic Java programming skills but it did mean that the person that did the approval configuration had to be a programmer.

Implementing in code also meant that the implementation really lacked agility. You do need to test code more extensive than configuration and that means that your cycle time will be longer than if you could create approval workflows through configuration.

In OIM 11g approval workflow configuration is done through BPEL. This means that you can get a business analyst with BPEL skills to do most if perhaps not all of the approval configuration and there are many more people with BPEL skills than OIM approval API available on the market.

It is clear that this was a long overdue improvement of OIM that will help customers both to have quicker and less painful implementations as well as improving the maintainability of OIM.

One thought that kind of strikes you is that this may be the first step to move more and more of the workflows in OIM from the mysterious objects in the design console and the Java API code into the world of BPEL. Interesting concept isn't it?

OIM 11g: Request management

OIM has always had support for requests based provisioning but the OIM request model is strongly connected  to resource objects. This works great if you want to request something that natively out of the box is a resource object, i.e. an AD account, but works less well if you need to be able to support requests for more granular things like attributes on a process form or target system roles on a child form connected to the process form.

There is a number of ways to work around this problem but none of these approaches is entirely problem free and/or require a lot of implementation work:

1. Wrap the entity in a custom resource object (example AD group memberships) 
2. Wrap the entity in a custom resource object and leverage OIM group and Access Policy framework
3. Create an custom menu item and do a custom request workflow
4. Create a totally custom request interface and connect to OIM using the APIs. Potentially use web services as a communication channel

Option one and two require some OIM knowledge and a bit of Java prowess. Option three requires Java, , OIM API skills, Spring and some basic GUI creation skills and four requires knowledge of some kind of web interface plus some understanding of the OIM APIs. Nothing extremely complicated but definitely requires more skill and time than simple configuration.

In 11g there is a new request framework that looks very promising that should hopefully mean that you no longer need to write custom code as soon as you need to support request for anything outside of the base resource objects. This will make OIM implementation that includes decently advanced requirements around requests substantially cheaper and faster.

If you look at the competition it is clearly a weak spot for OIM. IBM TIM has had framework for handling application roles/groups (they call it "access") since 5.0 so OIM clearly needed to catch up on this feature. The OIM framework looks more flexible so if the feature delivers on it's promises it could be a strong advantage for OIM.

OIM 11g: X2 is finally here

Back in the summer of 2005 I got trained on a product called Xellerate from a company called Thor Technologies. I really liked some features but a lot of the GUI felt distinctively old and Swing really never was a good GUI framework. No worries mate, said the nice company representative, X2 will be here soon and that will come with a brand new GUI. We even got to see some screenshots that looked quite nice.

As you all know Thor got bought by Oracle and the Oracleization process that turned Xellerate into OIM took a couple of years. Funnily enough the screenshots for OIM 11g are actually very similar to the screenshots that were shown to me in the hot conferance room in London way back in the summer of 2005.

Historically Oracle has often promised very interesting features that were delivered but didn't really have enough functional depth to be really useful until a couple of versions down the line (ORM integration, SPML support and generic connectors are a few examples). Many of the new features have been talked about for many years so hopefully this won't be the case this time.

The new OIM version looks really good with plenty of really strong features. A good feature overview can be found in A Primer on OIM 11g and you can also visit my, hopefully over time growing, list of in depth look at the new features:

• Request management
• Approval workflow management with BPEL