Microsoft’s Identity Integration Server (MIIS) and its “lite” version, the Identity Integration Feature Pack for Windows Server (IIFP) can help organizations get a handle on all the disparate databases throughout the organization that contain information about a person’s identity.
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner The Henson Group, Inc. (THG) provides infrastructure and development experts that specialize in deploying and extending MIIS solutions that enable the integration and management of identity information across multiple repositories, systems, and platforms.
The Henson Group’s MIIS solutions augment Active Directory (AD) by providing broad interoperability capabilities including integration with a wide range of identity repositories; provisioning and synchronizing identity information across multiple stores; brokering changes to identity information by automatically detecting updates and sharing the changes across systems; and managing passwords.
WHAT WE CAN DO FOR YOU: MICROSOFT IDENTITY INTEGRATION SERVER
Provision User Accounts and More: THG’s MIIS solutions allow you to easily provision and de-provision user accounts and identity information like distribution, e-mail, and security groups across systems and platforms. Clients who deploy THG's custom MIIS as strategic component of their identity management technology report numerous benefits, including administrative cost reductions; easier business process integration; improved consistency and integrity of data; and substantially increased security.
Clients will be able to quickly create new accounts for employees based on events or changes in authoritative stores like the human resources system. Additionally, when employees leave a company, they can be immediately de-provisioned from those same systems.
End users can be more productive by accessing needed systems faster while corporate security is improved as employees’ access to systems is automatically terminated when they leave. Administrators benefit from having these processes automated which improves their own productivity and helps to lower administrative costs.
Password Management: THG’s solutions provide effective password management capabilities that allow end users or helpdesk staff to easily reset passwords across multiple systems from one easy-to-use Web interface. End users and helpdesk staff will no longer have to use multiple tools to change their passwords across multiple systems. Password resets are the single greatest cost associated with a helpdesk. This feature helps companies to reduce the cost of their helpdesk operations while improving the productivity of their information technology (IT) workforce.
SQL Server Integration: Performance, scalability, and reliability are essential business needs for any infrastructure product—that is why Microsoft selected SQL Server as the data repository. SQL Server provides a powerful and comprehensive data management platform with revolutionary self-tuning and dynamic self-configuring features that optimize database performance—all of which makes SQL a perfect fit as the data repository for your identity information.
Visual Studio .NET Integration: Customers who wish to customize or extend the capabilities of MIIS 2003 can use any of the languages supported by Visual Studio .NET , such as Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET, Visual C# .NET, Visual J# .NET, or a third-party language such as Perl. Visual Studio .NET offers a highly productive environment in which you can extend or customize your MIIS implementation.
Strategic Reviews: During this initial phase, THG ascertains all of the client's data sources that contain logon information. This review process identifies areas where identity duplication can be eliminated. Based on its analysis, THG makes recommendations on what identity information from each connected data source needs to be imported.
Solution Architecture & Design: THG architects an MIIS solution that manages the flow of identity information between connected data sources, resolving identity conflicts throughout the organization. Based on decisions made in the Strategic Review, THG establishes rules to determine which directory should contain the authoritative value for a specific attribute in the meta-directory, detailing how updates will be performed for the meta-directory and other connected data sources based on that authoritative value
Deployment Services: THG configures MIIS to combine the data for a specific person or resource in the meta-directory, thereby creating a single entry that contains some, or all, of the identity information from each connected data source. This allows for a single, unified view that contains some, or all, of the attributes from the different connected data sources, regardless of whether or not the connected data sources are compatible.
Single Sign-On (SSO): Single sign-on (SSO) is a Microsoft feature that provides storage and mapping of credentials such as account names and passwords. Using SSO, The Henson Group enables portal site–based applications to retrieve information from third-party applications and back-end systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems. The use of single sign-on functionality enables users to authenticate only once when they access portal site–based applications that need to obtain information from other business applications and systems. THG configuring single sign-on consists of five tasks:
• Configuring the Microsoft Single Sign-On Service service
• Managing server settings for single sign-on
• Managing the encryption key
• Managing enterprise application definitions
• Managing account settings for enterprise application definitions
Centralization: While deploying the MIIS solution, THG enables the client to select one location from which administrators, applications, and users can access or manage the identity information for specific objects.
Password Reset Capabilities: THG’s solution delivers self-service password reset capabilities that greatly reduce calls to the client’s help desk or IT staff. This web-based password reset capability enables users to reset their passwords and allows help desk employees to use one interface to easily change passwords for users across a wide variety of systems.
Security Review: THG’s security experts will provide the client with advice and expertise, based on the very latest information available, to identify and address any existing security issues associated with the MIIS solution.
Management and Control: THG implements effective system notifications so IT administrators are aware of any current or potentially harmful issues affecting Microsoft Identity Integration Server or the server operating system.