Home Directory Management Agent

UPDATE: This MA is written in the now deprecated XMA framework. If you're using it, you may have to replace it with an update in the near future. Let me know if you're using it and if there is enough demand, I'll have a look into building a newer version in ECMA2.

I'm very pleased to announce that my (Home) Directory Management Agent has been released in initial version.

The Directory Management Agent is extensible management agent used to physically manage user’s home directories or other (create / move / remove) by calling customizable scripts for each operation and it will update home directory information on the Active Directory user object accordingly when scripts have executed succesfully. You'll be able to write the scripts in the scripting language of your desire (I prefer PowerShell).

This version is currently in final production testing at a few of my customers. You can find the downloadable here.

Please read through the documentation enclosed in the kit for guidance on how to install and configure. Also, there are sample scripts included. I would very much like to get some feedback if you test this out in your environment - and please help spread the word to those "in need".

Happy hunting... oh, and scripting...

Please let me know if you use it and what your experience is; any news, good or bad are very welcome.

The released version is as-is, however, you can contact me for details on support options if this is required for your setup.

FIM 2010 SQL Agents Jobs

Recently I've run into a few FIM 2010 installations where unfortunately there was paid no attention to the SQL Agent jobs that are created when FIM 2010 is installed.

Microsoft has put out a few good pointers with regards to these and it is well-worth while to read through these. You can find them here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff830030(WS.10).aspx.

The parts about temporal sets and group are very interesting and leads me my biggest wish for future versions on FIM. We do need customizable triggers that can be defined in the portal. These are needed for different tasks and it would be very nice to be able to move these away from SQL Stored Procedures and into the FIM Service instead. Especially, so that you don't have to convience your (or your customers) SQL DBA to have and maintain different schedules for these speciel FIM jobs.

Just some food for thought.

Formatting phone numbers

I just love regular expressions.

I'm currently doing a FIM 2010 project where I'm required to format phone numbers; stumbled on this great post by Steve Levithan on capturing and formatting phone numbers of various origin.

Thanks, Steve, for helping me on the way...