Things I’d like to see in the NW IDM Console…

On and off, I’ve been working with the IDM console since 2004, and on the whole I’d say that the interface has always gotten better from release to release.  However as I’ve been working with the software recently a number of issues have been appearing that I hope the development team will be able to address in coming releases:

1. By default, Identity Management has a huge number of objects and scrolling through them can be a bit of a chore.  I’d love to see the attribute selection interface change somewhat.  At the very least, put in a scroll bar, but ideally I’d like to see an interface where I can just type a few letters of the attribute to select it.

2. When setting up the initial connection strings, how about a way to test the JDBC connection?  We’ve got this in VDS.  It would be a great addition to IDM.

3. While we’re on the topic of connection strings.  I’d really like to have an integrated wizard for constructing the ODBC strings.  We’re just building a text string here, do we really need to go out to the ODBC interface?  I realize there might be good reasons for using the ODBC app.  This one might just be me.

4. Install paths… The install path should be stored in the registry so that once on app is installed to a server that becomes the default install location.  I know a lot of admins who prefer to have IDM installed much higher in the tree structure… Typing D:PROGRAM FILESSAPIDM… gets old after a while.

On the whole the application does more than it ever did before, the next challenge is to make it easier to tame all of the capabilites at the Architect’s and Engineer’s disposal.  All-in-all, not a bad place to be.