Hello Everyone! 

OK, I admit.  I am lame for not posting here in 16 months.  I've been very busy and I want to be able to provide valuable and helpful information but I need to table the previous topic.  In my last post, I was building a Fantasy Football Engine with ILM 2007  and I still want to do that... eventually.  More appropriately, however, one of my last projects was the Microsoft Retail Stores and one of the outcomes of the project was a Extensible Connectivity Management Agent for Dynamics AX. 

In MIIS 2003 SP1 and later (and ILM 2007/FIM 2010) the Extensible Connectivity Management Agent is the answer to the question "Does MIIS have a management agent for X?" if X is not compatible with a management agent built into the product or available as an add-on or download.  Utilizing the IMAExtensibleCallExport, IMAExtensibleFileExport and/or the IMAExtensibleFileImport interfaces of the Microsoft.MetadirectoryServices namespace you can hook into just about anything that is .Net to connect to a data source.  For Dynamics AX, I utilized the Microsoft.Dynamics.BusinessConnectorNet namespace to write entries to Dynamics AX within IMAExtensibleCallExport and to import and confirm building a file with IMAExtensibleFileImport.  I felt I needed to create this management agent using an Extensible MA rather than using a database MA, as Dynamics AX can utilize a couple of different versions of SQL, as well as other third party database products and I wanted to build the Management Agent to be reusable for future customers beyond the Microsoft Retail Stores.

Building the AX MA was not a trivial exercise.  I came into the project knowing absolutely nothing about Dynamics AX.  I must say, Dynamics AX is the singlemost elegant product I have ever worked with!!  I received a list of attributes and tables that I needed to interface with to provision users and a preferred order to write them in from the Retail Store AX team and started cranking the management agent out.  In the next few posts, I will address how I tackled building the management agent and some of the issues that were encountered and how they were resolved. 

--Shawn

 This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.