Novell adds self-service to provisioning platform

Novell this week plans to roll out the latest version of its provisioning software, which will aid users in automating workflows and easing management.

Identity Manager 3.0 , a component of Novell's Identity and Access Management suite, helps users automate account creation and manage user identities. The software includes a tool to configure automated-approval workflows, an interface for user self-service provisioning, a set of visual configuration tools and delegated-administration features.

Novell has not had a major release of Identity Manager since January 2004. The company is upgrading at a time when competitors have been trying to build identity-management suites through acquisition; Novell has largely built its technology from the ground up.

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Novell this week plans to roll out the latest version of its provisioning software, which will aid users in automating workflows and easing management.

Identity Manager 3.0 , a component of Novell's Identity and Access Management suite, helps users automate account creation and manage user identities. The software includes a tool to configure automated-approval workflows, an interface for user self-service provisioning, a set of visual configuration tools and delegated-administration features.

Novell has not had a major release of Identity Manager since January 2004. The company is upgrading at a time when competitors have been trying to build identity-management suites through acquisition; Novell has largely built its technology from the ground up.

The new features of Identity Manager are catching the attention of users. Brian Hobbs, IT director for Powat, Calif., manufacturer Hunter Douglas, plans to roll out the delegated-administration features.

"We are a very distributed organization with administrators in 30 locations," says Hobbs. "We can set up pages for them to go and help manage our identity vault." Hobbs also has his eye on the new workflow features as part of the company's phased rollout of Identity Manager 3.0.

"We want a system that when someone requests access to, say, our data warehouse, we can auto-generate that message and set up an approval workflow. Right now, the process is 15 to 20 phone calls," he says.

The approval workflow is part of Identity Manager's separate Provisioning Module. It lets a user request access to an application using a self-service portal, another new feature of the software.

A workflow based on the user's title and manager's name is initiated to manage completion of the request. The workflow can be configured with exceptions so it does not stall if someone within the process is out of the office.

Novell also has built on an import feature that lets users import into Identity Manager 3.0 all the workflow and directory mappings they defined in Version 2.0 of the product.

Version 3.0's Audit Starter Pack lets users automatically generate compliance reports that show user access to applications and services. There is also a white pages feature with an organizational chart.

Novell also has included a graphical modeling tool for mapping out the connections between systems and defining rules, such as synchronization, for how they integrate.