This software allows you to simplify the management of identity, as it can help you synchronize data across multiple resources. Each organization can maintain control of accounts within their respective domains.

IDM works equally well with user, group, and device identities.

You can also configure workflows to help users manage how they sign up for accounts, as part of how IDM manages the life cycle of users and their accounts.

You can manage employee identities as they move from job to job. You will make their lives easier as their user accounts can be registered on different systems automatically. Later, IDM can increase productivity when it reconciles information from different accounts, saving users the hassle of entering the same information on different systems.

In this guide, you will see how IDM reconciles user data between two data stores. We will look at a department that is adding a third engineer, Jane Sanchez.

Your Human Resources department has updated their data store with Jane Sanchez's information. You want to use IDM to update the internal Engineering data store. But first, you have to start IDM.

This section covers what you need to have on your system before running IDM:

Note that this Getting Started document is provided for demonstration purposes only.

The aim of this document is to make it as easy as possible to set up a demonstration of IDM software. To that end, the document has been written for installations on a desktop operating system not supported by ForgeRock, Microsoft Windows 7.

For a list of software that ForgeRock supports in production, see "Before You Install" in the Release Notes. The details in the Release Notes supersede any information shown in this guide.

When the server is ready, you can administer it from a web browser. To do so, navigate to http://localhost:8080/admin or https://localhost:8443/admin. If you have installed the server on a remote system, substitute that hostname or IP address for localhost.

The default username and password for the IDM Administrator is openidm-admin and openidm-admin.

When you log into IDM at a URL with the /admin endpoint, you are logging into the Administrative User Interface, also known as the Admin UI.

All users, including openidm-admin, can change their password through the Self-Service UI, at http://localhost:8080/ or https://localhost:8443/. Once logged in, click Profile > Password.

In a production deployment, you can have any number of external data stores, such as Active Directory and ForgeRock Directory Services (DS). For illustration purposes, this guide uses two simple static files as external data stores:

You can find these files in the binary package that you downloaded earlier, in the following subdirectory: openidm/samples/getting-started/data.

A central feature of IDM is reconciliation - comparing the contents of two data stores and deciding what to do, depending on the differences.

This scenario is based on two data files:

Reconciliation modifies the Engineering data store by adding the newly hired Jane Sanchez. As suggested by the following illustration, it will also address detailed differences between Jane's Human Resources account and the Engineering data store.

Data Stores Can Have Different Categories of Data

This sample includes configuration files that map detailed information from the Human Resources data store to the Engineering data store. For example, the configuration maps the firstName entry in Human Resources to the firstname entry in Engineering.

In the Admin UI, you can see how the different categories are reconciled for user Jane Sanchez. Log in to the Admin UI at https://localhost:8443/admin. The default username is openidm-admin and default password is openidm-admin.

Select Configure > Mappings > HumanResources_Engineering > Edit.

In the Sample source preview text box, enter Sanchez. You should see a drop-down entry for Jane Sanchez that you can select. You should now see how IDM would reconcile Jane Sanchez's entry from the (source) Human Resources data store into the (target) Engineering data store.

Reconciling Differences for an Account

Scroll back up the same page. Select Reconcile.

When you reconcile the two data stores, IDM makes the change to the Engineering data store.

For those of you who prefer the command-line interface, you can see how the mapping works in the sync.json file, in the /path/to/openidm/samples/getting-started/conf directory.

Now that you have used IDM to reconcile two data stores, try something else. Assume the Engineering organization wants to overwrite all user telephone numbers in its employee data store with one central telephone number.

For this purpose, you can set up a default telephone number for the next reconciliation:

When you select Update, and Save, IDM changes the sync.json configuration file. The next time you run a reconciliation from Human Resources to Engineering, the default telephone number will be included for all employees in the Engineering group.

A business process begins with an objective and includes a well-defined sequence of tasks to meet that objective. IDM allows you to configure many of these tasks as self-service workflows, such as self-registration, new user onboarding, and account certification.

You can also automate many of these tasks as a workflow.

Once you configure the right workflows, a newly hired engineer can log into IDM and request access to manufacturing information.

That request is sent to the appropriate manager for approval. Once approved, IDM provisions the new engineer with access to manufacturing.

IDM supports workflow-driven provisioning activities, based on the embedded Activiti Process Engine, which complies with the Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 (BPMN 2.0) standard.

You can manage passwords from the Self-Service User Interface, also known as the Self-Service UI. From the Admin UI, select the icon in the upper-right corner. In the menu that appears, choose Self-Service:

Access the Self-Service User Interface

You should now be in the Self-Service UI. In the Dashboard, select Change Password. You can now change your password, subject to the following minimum number of characters:

IDM supports robust password policies. You can modify policies such as the following:

For more information, including details on how you can configure these policies, see "Managing Passwords" in the Integrator's Guide.

Some users need accounts on multiple systems. For example, insurance agents may also have insurance policies with the company that they work for. In that situation, the insurance agent is also a customer of the company.

Alternatively, a salesperson may also test customer engineering scenarios. That salesperson may also need access to engineering systems.

Each of these user scenarios is known as a role. You can set up a consolidated set of attributes associated with each role. To do so, you would configure custom roles to assign to selected users. For example, you may assign both insured and agent roles to an agent, while assigning the insured role to all customers.

In a similar fashion, you can assign both sales and engineering roles to the sales engineer.

You can then synchronize users with those roles into appropriate data stores.

For more information, see "Working With Managed Roles" in the Integrator's Guide. For a sample of how you can configure external roles, see "Provisioning With Roles" in the Samples Guide.

IDM can connect to a substantial variety of user and device data stores, on premise and in the cloud. A number of specific connectors are provided, allowing you to connect to those dedicated data stores. In addition, you can connect to many more data stores using a scripted connector framework.

For a full list, see "Connectors Supported With IDM 6" in the Connector Reference.

If the resource that you need is not on the list, you should be able to use one of the scripted connector frameworks to connect to that resource:

IDM supports reconciliation between two data stores, as a source and a target.

In identity management, reconciliation compares the contents of objects in different data stores, and makes decisions based on configurable policies.

For example, if you have an application that maintains its own user store, IDM can ensure your canonical directory attributes are kept up to date by reconciling their values as they are changed.

For more information, see "Synchronizing Data Between Resources" in the Integrator's Guide.

Several different authentication modules are supplied to help you protect your systems. For more information, see "Supported Authentication and Session Modules" in the Integrator's Guide.

IDM is a lightweight and highly customizable identity management product.

The documentation includes a number of additional use cases. Most of these are known as Samples, and are described in "Overview of the Samples" in the Samples Guide.

These samples include step-by-step instructions on how you can connect to different data stores, customize product behavior using JavaScript and Groovy, and administer IDM with ForgeRock's common REST API commands.

Now that you have seen how IDM can help you manage users, review the features that IDM can bring to your organization:

Follow these steps to stop and remove IDM.

We hope that you want to continue exploring IDM.

To do so, review the documentation available on ForgeRock's BackStage site.