Been a bit quiet lately :-)

You may have noticed that I\’ve been fairly quiet on the blogging front lately. I’ve been horrendously busy implementing a meta-directory for a client. This thing is an absolute beast – synchronising an SAP HR system with 3 (yes, 3!) Active Directories plus a bunch of other minor sync tasks. This makes for a hideously complex set of provisioning rules as you might imagine. We’ve been making use of Microsoft’s Identity Integration Server 2003 and been having some interesting experiences. More about this a bit later, I’m not quite up to talking about it yet. I will say that the product is really good and really frustrating all in one go! Really good in that it is incredibly easy to setup and get started and for simple attribute synchronisation between directories it’s great. The really hard yakka comes when you try to do something a little more advanced – like provision Exchange accounts for example. Now at this point you’re probably thinking “that’s sounds really easy. It should be able to do that” And I would agree with you. This is apparently one of it’s core functions. But do you think we can make it play nice. No! We’ve had to park the mailbox provisioning part of the project and come back to it later it’s just gotten too difficult. Now it’s probably something really simple that we’ve just gotten wrong somewhere and we’ll kick ourselves when we figure it out, but from research on the net it appears there’s an enourmous amount of confusion and pain around this very thing. Lot’s of posts with similar problems to ours… Oh well, we’ll get there eventually. Hopefully MS can come up with something that’ll help. The biggest problem is the shocking state of the documentation and examples around the product. MSDN is essentially useless when you’re trying to do more complex things with the product. The descriptions of the API functions are woefully inadequate and the API’s themselves are incredibly confusing. The CreateMailbox API call is overloaded with 6(!) slightly different calls and they all seem to do different things (but there’s nothing to say what those things are!). Sorry, don’t mean to rave on, but it’s hard going trying to decipher a product from the outside in