The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

I received an email asking why I keeping using Sun Identity Manager if I disliked the product as much as I do.  The truth is that I don’t dislike it, but I sure don’t love it either.  Sun Identity Manager solves a provisioning problem for me but at a much higher time investment than I’d like.

For the most part, I like the behind-the-scenes systems that Sun IDM has.  The provisioning engine is relatively good.  The active sync scanner and deferred tasks have proved invaluable in my organization.  And, of course, the resource connectors themselves are the entire reason the whole system works.  The workflows, forms (for data manipulation) and Xpress language are all pretty good.  (Though, to be honest I’d rather see Xpress dropped in favor of Beanshell or some other more robust language.)

What I don’t like is the web interface.  It’s clunky, slow and difficult to use.  It’s nearly impossible to customize it to something that makes sense or even supports somewhat modern web standards.  (Go ahead and try to customize the end user interface to support the accessibility requirements of users with vision impairments.  It’s not a trivial task.)  I don’t have an issue with the way the IDM forms manipulate data, only the HTML generation.  Since JSPs aren’t used to customize the look and feel one is forced to use a rather complex and convoluted language just to do what JSP and HTML itself was designed to do.

I’m also not a huge fan of the documentation.  Both the training materials Sun has and the standard product documentation feel out of date and haphazardly put together.  (For the record I’ve taken all the expensive Sun IDM courses.  I also hate the word ExampleChoc.  )  There is also a significant lack of consistency in terminology across the product.  A workflow is a process is a task is an activity.  It’s tough for a new developer to figure out what is what when the terminology keeps changing.

The javadocs are often of little help.  They are a huge wasteland of undocumented or incorrect information. However, the documentation in the 8.1 release is a huge improvement over the documentation in IDM 7.1.  I look forward to seeing the improvements coming up with 9.0.  A product this complex warrants some good documentation, especially given that it’s not open-source.

So it does the job.  Some parts it does well.  Other parts are incredibly poorly done.  The parts it does well are often not mentioned enough because it’s only when one has problems tweaking something to fit specific business needs that any note is taken.  It’s easy to forget that the back-end system of my IDM deployment processes several thousand account updates per day in real time when I’m trying to get a form to just display properly.