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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.

Getting started with OpenSSO

Few days back i have started reading about OpenSSO. OpenSSO is Sun's open Web access management project that's based on the Sun Java System Access Manager source code. Future versions of Sun Java System Access Manager will be built from OpenSSO. After getting a basic idea of OpenSSO i have followed a four part article given at Sun Developer Network to get a good feel of developing secure web application using OpenSSO.

Below are the steps to successfully complete the exercises given at http://developers.sun.com/identity/reference/techart/id-svcs.html

1. Follow the steps given at http://developers.sun.com/identity/reference/techart/opensso-glassfish.html to download and deploy the OpenSSO on Glassfish Application Server. (I have used OpenSSO V1 Build 5 Zip to complete the exercises.)
2. Follow the steps given for each one of the 4 exercises given at http://developers.sun.com/identity/reference/techart/id-svcs.html. The steps in each exercise are in detail and self explanatory. Below are those 4 exercises.

Exercise 1:-

Securing Applications With Identity Services, Part 1: AuthenticationThrough an example of a client web application(IdSvcsClient) built with the NetBeans IDE and deployed on GlassFish Application Server, this article, Part 1 of a series, shows you how to configure OpenSSO so as to authenticate—by means of identity services—users who access protected resources.

Exercise 2:-

Securing Applications With Identity Services, Part 2: AuthorizationHere in Part 2, again with IdSvcsClient, an example client application built with the NetBeans IDE, you learn how to further configure OpenSSO so as to allow authenticated users to perform tasks for which they have been authorized.

Exercise 3:-

Securing Applications With Identity Services, Part 3: User AttributesIn this exercise the task of obtaining the attributes of users whose tokens are passed in service calls will be handled. User attributes are also called profile attributes, This article, Part 3 of the series, describes how to fetch user attributes by means of the attribute service, still with IdSvcsClient as an example.

Exercise 4:-

Securing Applications With Identity Services, Part 4: Single Sign-On and Logout Here in Part 4, you're shown how to achieve single sign-on (SSO) and logout with REST. Even though the procedures in this part start with authentication as a key part of the process, the emphasis is on SSO and logout.

Note:- I have done all these exercise in VMWare WinXp-image. The size of WinXP-Image has reached to 4.13GB after installing NetBeans IDE, GlassFish Application Server and after deploying OpenSSO and sample client web application IdSvcsClient, so if you also want to do this in virtual environment, make sure you have sufficient memory available before starting these exercises and also make sure you have minimum 1GB RAM setting for the virtual image to get a better response. Ignore this note if you don't want to do these exercises in virtual environment.