A couple of weeks ago (week 24) I went in a course in CA Identity Manager (the Foundation-course, i.e. ET310). Until that I only had experience with the CA eTrust Admin product, so it was an exciting meeting with this new product "on top" of that.

The IM is erected upon a product called SiteMinder and gives the possibilities to make the IdM-part far more dynamic than "just" the static construction achieved by using Admin only. Not only does the property of dynamics make it smart - there are several more improvements to the product. As a developer I especially like the TEWS (Task Execution Web Services) where every action within the console has a web service counterpart.

Not all thrilled of excitement, since it's still quite clear that the IM and Admin are two different products with all the cons as a consequence hereof, but in the next release these two products should be more integrated.

As a comment to the course, it was actually ok, although the course material wasn't the best seen ever. Some minor errors (and they really was minor) caused a lot of trouble; some not discovered until too late. But still, we all gained a lot of knowledge about IM.

Finally, the IM-part together with the already matured Admin is like having chocolate-sauce and sparklers on your ice cream, and hopefully the next release makes it out for a starter (or even a main course) with ancillary wine ad libitum.