Forefront Identity Manager

Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM) is a state-based identity management software product, designed to manage users' digital identities, credentials and groupings throughout the lifecycle of their membership of an enterprise computer system. FIM integrates with Active Directory and Exchange Server to provide identity synchronization, certificate management, user password resets and user provisioning from a single interface.

Part of the Microsoft Identity and Access Management platform product line, FIM superceded Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM), and was known as ILM 2 during development. ILM 2007 was created by merging Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 (MIIS) and Certificate Lifecycle Manager (CLM).

FIM 2010 utilises Windows Workflow Foundation concepts, using transactional workflows to manage and propagate changes to a user's state-based identity. This is in contrast to most of the transaction-based competing products that do not have a state-based element. Administrators not only can create workflows with the web-based GUI of ILM 2 portal but also include more complex workflows designed outside of the portal by importing XOML files.

Codeless Provisioning
Forefront Identity Manager introduces the concept of "codeless provisioning", which allows administrators to create objects in any connected data source without writing any code in one of the .NET framework languages.

The codeless provisioning provided in FIM should be able to sustain most of the simple to medium complexity scenarios for account lifecycle management. FIM fully honors exiting MIIS implementations and supports "traditional" coded provisioning side-by-side with code-less provisioning methods.