Welcome to the Identity Management Team’s extensibility blog. The purpose of this blog is to provide information, suggestions, examples, and show context to decisions regarding extensibility points in ILM. The primary focus of this blog is on the web service interface since this interface is at the heart of all extensibility scenarios.

This is the first of many regularly-published posts that will show you how to make ILM work for you or your customers. We are setting this blog up in order to contribute to the growing momentum around ILM’s upcoming release.  We intentionally are starting the posts this week to coincide with the ILM “2” release candidate.

Before we begin, here are the usual disclaimers:

  1. Everything here is provided “as is” by individuals on the team. These posts are not official statements made by the team and are not supported. We hope they are helpful, but please realize that these posts do not go through the rigorous release process Microsoft products go through.
  2. Any code we provide or link to from this blog is provided “as is”. There is no guarantee that the code will work for you.
  3. While we are close to RTM, things still may change. We may show a screen shot, code snippet, or mention a feature that may not appear the same or even exist in ILM RTM. Similarly, if we mention dates, do not assume these dates are “set in stone.”
  4. In the case of a conflict or ambiguity, always rely on official documentation.
  5. We cannot provide support or answer specific questions about your extensibility scenarios here in this blog. Please use other forums like the connect site or you Microsoft contact for more information.
  6. We do not necessarily endorse anyone, nor are we responsible for the content we link to.

We’d like to point out other blogs in the ILM community:

  1. Craig’s Blog (Sets, Policies, and Rights)
  2. Mark’s Blog (Workflow)
  3. Bobby and Nima’s Blog (Codeless Provisioning)
  4. ILM Best Practices (Microsoft MVP)

Finally, here is an outline of upcoming topics:

  1. Introduction to this blog (11/4)
  2. Terminology used in ILM (11/5)
  3. How ILM uses its own web services (11/6)
  4. Introduction to ILM’s web services (11/7)
  5. Introduction to WS-Transfer (11/11)
  6. Introduction to WS-Enumeration (11/12)
  7. Introduction to Transfer Extensions for Identity Management Operations (11/13)
  8. How to start your client (11/18)
  9. How to build your custom client (11/19)
  10. How to interpret SOAP Faults (11/20)
  11. Sample scenario: Get a specific person (12/2)
  12. Sample scenario: Get a specific person with extensions (12/4)
  13. Sample scenario: Enumerate all persons (12/9)
  14. Sample scenario: Get ILM schema (12/11)
  15. Sample scenario: Create a new group (12/16)
  16. Sample scenario: Add and remove a members in a group (12/18)
  17. Sample scenario: Update MA config using web services (1/15)

If you have specific questions, we’d encourage you to speak with your Microsoft partner or contact. If there are specific topics you’d like to see discussed here, please comment below. Please consider broad topics that are generally useful for many of our customers.

The goal of this blog is to bridge the gap between documentation we released in RC and will release in RTM.  We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from customers just from using the out-of-box experience with the portal and Outlook add-in.  We believe our customers can enable even more rich experiences with ILM’s web service interface.  We hope by showing you how to make use of the web services you can more extensively evaluate ILM “2” Release Candidate.