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Sun Certified Integrator for Identity Manager 7.1

I thought of testing my Luck and doing some adventurous thing on 31st Dec 2008-as a final thing I could in the year :-) and I decided to write Sun Certified Integrator for Identity Manager 7.1 exam with out having even a single project experience on IDM. Thinking I am crazy? :-) Not really, there is one more reason for that- I just wanted to utilize my Sun certification voucher which is going to expire on 31st Dec 2008.



My overall opinion on the exam is “It can be cracked”. Here is my experience; the exam contains total 56 multiple choice questions out of which we have to answer 43% of questions correctly to pass the exam, are you going to write this exam in near future? here are some points that can help you in the exam preparation.

1. There are around 6 to 7 questions on EXPRESS language, the questions would be like asking for the syntax errors in a given code snippet, asking for the output of a given code snippet etc.. I feel spending considerable preparation time on EXPRESS language would be a good idea.



2. There are around 5 to 6 questions on SPML, SPML I mean both SPML1.0 and SPML2.0. The questions would be on the differences between SPML1.0 and SPML2.0, what are the SPML capabilities supported by Sun Identity Manager and also on SPML API.



3. There are some questions on SPE; I feel the first point of contact for SPE preparation would be idmspe-refkit.zip that comes with the IDM installation. Of course preparation from other sources will always help. The questions I have got are like asking for the output of a given code snippet and how to invoke a method from the EXPRESS code etc..



4. Most of the questions i have got are from real time scenarios, meaning given a client’s problem scenario which action would be an appropriate to solve the problem. I feel having a full project life cycle experience (i.e., right from the requirements gathering to deployment in production) would be the only way to correctly answer 100% of these questions. This section also includes the experience on development estimations (Question is something like ‘which of the following tasks can be delivered quickly?’).



5. There are some questions on IDM concepts like ‘Delegated administration’, ‘Password Sync’, ‘Identity Sync’, ’Rules’, ‘Forms’, ‘Workflows’, ‘variables’ (in Forms, Rules and WFs), ‘Controlled Organizations’ and ‘Capabilities’, etc..



6. Also there are some questions on ‘Real time Performance issues’. The question I have got is like ‘The client noticed that a workflow is causing a delay in application response time, which of the following could improve the performance?’, etc..

These are the points I could make out of my experience, if anyone has some additional points to add please feel free to put them in your comments.