It would seem that MIIS needed a name change so for those who are just new to the Microsoft IDM game, the rules have changed again! While much of the underlying functions of the old Zoomit technology are still buried under the ILM covers, some new features are due to be released this summer with ILM 2007 and even more is planned for the upcoming ILM release due at the end of the year.

Certificate and Smart Card Management

ILM 2007 can now act as an administrative proxy for the Windows Server Certificate Authorities (CA). By providing a web interface for the administrative functions and supporting the CA plug-in, it can communicate with the server and at the same time provide some auditing and logging to help centralize certificate events. While this may be a snazzy feature, I am not sure I have experienced a situation where it would have helped much. to be honest, I would have preferred them to spend much more time on reporting and a better UI.

Performance and Licensing

Anyone who has done any level of provisioning with MIIS understands that it is very processor intensive. To make matters worse, Microsoft's MIIS 2003 Capacity Planning guide points out that performance will not improve much even with four processors. So if MIIS is sold based on number of processors and you returns are limited past two processors....does the license model need to be re-addressed? My bet is that you will see some changes in how MIIS is sold.

Now, if I do not sound overly excited about this name change then you have read me correctly. Having said that, I am terribly interested and downright excited about the changes in the upcoming release of ILM 2007 late this year and some of the integration of the technology in Windows Longhorn Server. That my friend, is for another time though!