Coeus

11 Dec 2012

MidPoint version 2.1 code-named Coeus was released yesterday. This sixth midPoint release focuses on practical features, code quality and robustness. The major changes include:

• Password policies used to both validate and generate passwords
• Provisioning consistency allows execution of provisioning operations even if target resource is down. The operations will be replayed when is comes up again. This feature also handles other situations such as attempt to create an account that already exists. The handling of provisioning errors is integrated into the midPoint synchronization engine. This feature is quite unique to midPoint, it is not common in the identity management field.
• Numerous synchronization improvements and fixes. The synchronization situations are now recorded directly in the shadows, the synchronization engine was tested for numerous situations and it supports more configuration options (e.g. tolerant attributes) and the overall code quality was significantly improved.
• Introduction of mapping mechanism provides much more reliable and flexible way pass values from users to accounts and vice versa. It takes advantage of relative changes model that is basic principle of midPoint operation. Introduction of mapping allows better implementation of usual IDM requirements such as flexible RBAC hybrids and Rule-Based RBAC (RB-RBAC).
• Support for assignments was improved by introducing several modes of assignment enforcement. This means broader applicability of midPoint synchronization, assignment and RBAC mechanism. MidPoint can now be deployed in almost any IDM scenario and this also allows more flexibility during initial IDM deployment and migration.
• Numerous GUI and usability improvements. There is a first version of preview changes page that will be improved even more in later releases. It is easier to work with remote connectors now, error reporting and logging has been improved, basic resource-centric views were introduced, etc.
• MidPoint includes experimental reporting and workflow integrations based on JasperReports and Activiti respectively. This is meant as preview of features that will come in later releases but this functionality is already partially usable for some deployments.

The internal quality of midPoint code was also significantly improved. MidPoint build contains a lot of automated integration tests that are executed all the time in a continuous integration fashion. There were some internal re-engineering efforts to get rid of historical code parts. The architecture of the product is well established and proven to be flexible enough and efficient for almost any IDM challenge.

The Coeus release is a major step forward. MidPoint is considerably stable now. However we plan to make sure that the quality is more than acceptable. The next midPoint release will be a maintenance release. We plan to work much more on testing, quality and usability improvements. The primary goal of midPoint is an IDM solution that can be efficiently deployed and maintained while keeping the total cost reasonable. MidPoint seems to be well positioned to be one of the very few IDM products to reach that goal.