It’s been a worn out recording for most of us at UNIFY … trying to make the point that ILM works very nicely in Event Driven (ED) mode thankyou very much, and doesn’t have to be dumb and run on a schedule like all the other kids do it. Nice to see that finally the worm is starting to turn as IdM architects looking to swap over to the Microsoft IdM platform (ILM) around the world are starting to show interest in our Event Broker (EB, formerly UNIFYNow) for ILM.
In starting out this (long overdue) blog, my intended audience is three-fold:
- long time MIIS/ILM implementors who might see the benefits of a different approach to the BOG standard deployment
- past and present UNIFY customers who already have ED-ILM but could probably do with a few more pointers
- those looking at ILM for the first time and noticing the hole where the ED- bit is supposed to be (which is part-and-parcel of the other mainstream products such as Novells NIM)
I’d really love to know what exactly it is that has been preventing this from catching on. Maybe people have to work with ILM first before they understand? Maybe it’s ease of use? Maybe it’s price (although I’d like to think that’s surely not the case). Maybe its a combination of things. Whatever it is, I’m trying to get to the bottom of it, and this year plan to devote a good number of posts to this subject in the hope that the sound of pennys dropping will be deafening 
. The rebranding from UNIFYNow to Event Broker is all about reaching you the audience out there with something a little more meaningful in a name. The fact is that until now it has been something we at UNIFY have tended to implement ourselves, partly because it has fallen in the "too hard" basket, but mainly because we haven’t had the bandwidth to take this to the world properly. Time to change that!
. The rebranding from UNIFYNow to Event Broker is all about reaching you the audience out there with something a little more meaningful in a name. The fact is that until now it has been something we at UNIFY have tended to implement ourselves, partly because it has fallen in the "too hard" basket, but mainly because we haven’t had the bandwidth to take this to the world properly. Time to change that!As a prelude to these, I’d simply like to point out that the past 12 months have seen me focus my attention on another one of our UNIFY products in SharePoint Broker (SB) for ILM, where we hook up the MOSS2007 User Profiles to ILM independently of AD and give them a new leash on life. In the process of doing so we found that people actually got the whole ED thing by conceptualising the SharePoint Broker value proposition. The only way the SB model was ever going to work was if it was in NRT (near real time), so we found there was never any question that both SB and EB go together to achieve the desired outcome of automated bi-directional user profile management for MOSS (see the attached diagrams Point-Point Sync vs. MOSS under ED-ILM).
Well now we’ve come full circle and realised that there are a lot of people wanting to know how to turn ILM into ED-ILM. I’m hoping I can show you how, beyond the marketing pre-amble that you will find on our website at UNIFY Solutions. First installment coming shortly …
Cheers.
IdM for Real 
Since this post a few years ago, UNIFY have launched http://www.fimeventbroker.com/ which is version 3 of the product (full rewrite for FIM 2010, but backwardly compatible for ILM 2007) with a superior web UI replacing the windows console from previous versions, and incorporating custom workflow activities to enable just-in-time delivery of FIM 2010 policy via the sync engine. Allows you to achieve continuous compliance on the FIM platform.