At TechEd this year it was apparent that Microsoft had a clear focus and that was Identity Lifecycle Manager "2", now in beta 3. From Bob Muglia’s Keynote speech all the way down to the logo on my room key MSFT highlighted this product.
Personally I never really thought much about the product; I have heard of it before but never dove into the technology. Given the high exposure I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to check it out. I took advantage of one of the sessions and practiced interacting with the product at TechEd’s Hands-on-Lab center.
This product is very cool and I could see how it could save a medium to enterprise size IT department a ton of time. Basically ILM allows IT to distribute some of the common AD functions to the end user. Given HR the ability to add/change/delete user accounts in AD, managers the ability to manage lists and group distributions, and give IT the ability to setup simple workflow’s for managing account accounts.
This product is well-worth checking out, especially if you are wasting time on basic AD changes.
