ECMA 2 PowerShell Management Agent 1.0 released

I'm pleased to announce that my PowerShell Management Agent (MA) has been released. This version is a completely rewritten Management Agent and is now built on the ECMA 2.0 Framework that is included in the FIM 2010 Rollup 2 and of course in FIM 2010 R2.

The PowerShell Management Agent is very flexible allowing you to define your own schema (using a PowerShell script) and run scripts for Full Imports and Exports. The download includes complete documentation, so I won't write more information in this blog entry.

You can get the bits here.

Please note that I'm not able to offer free support for this, however, you can sign up for official support for this Management Agent if you do so wish. Please contact me for more details on a support agreement.

PowerShell Management Agent updated

A small bug was discovered in the PowerShell Management Agent (MA). The bug was about type casting different attribute types than strings. If you're only flowing attribute values of type string to the MA, you wouldn't have noticed this issue.

However, the issue have been fixed and you could consider updating to the newest version.

You can read more about the PowerShell Management Agent here

Updated workflow for looking up values in FIM

Today, I again utilized my 'old' lookup-workflow. But I had to make a minor adjustment (or improvement as it may be) to make it support other target attributes than strings.

If you didn't know about the little helper workflow, then have a look at my old post on this which has a good explanation of it (and where you can find the bits for download as well).

I'm pretty sure that you'll find it a helpful tool.

Use Powershell to put your assemblies in the GAC

To use your own custom build workflows for FIM 2010, you need to put the hosting assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) in the server hosting the FIM Service.

Normally, you'd want to download the .NET Framework SDK and get a hold of the Global Assembly Cache Tool (Gacutil.exe) which you certainly can use for the job of putting a DLL in the GAC. However, often times the SDK is not installed on the FIM Server and you may not even want to install this on your FIM Server.

PowerShell to the rescue. Since Gacutil.exe probably use .NET functions to get the job done, why not use the same functions from PowerShell and save the huge download and install?

Just get this short script which you can use instead of Gacutil.exe to put one or more assemblies in the cache without needing the .NET Framework SDK.

To learn how to use the script, just read the embedded help which also contains examples. Type this command in a PowerShell prompt -

Get-Help .\Add-AssemblyToGlobalAssemblyCache.ps1 -Detailed

Happy scripting...

Be careful about FIM Update Rollup 2

Microsoft has discovered an issue with turning on the "hiding" feature of "tabular functions" to improve query performance. This is the statement from the product team (from the forum) -

"FIM 2010 Update Rollup 2 (build 4.0.3606.2) contains a feature that is intended to improve Query performance in the case of certain complex queries. This “tabular functions” feature is turned off by default. The product team wanted to get experience among a controlled group of customers before announcing the feature for general use. However, we inadvertently included information about this feature in the original KB for Update Rollup 2 and have since removed it. However, we understand that information about how to turn on the feature is circulating among the FIM community. Once the feature is turned on it cannot be turned off.
The product team has discovered an issue in this feature that could return incorrect query results when the query includes at least two statements and the same attribute is referenced in the statements. For example:


/Person[(AccountName=’A’ and JobTitle=’Developer’) or (AccountName’=’B’ and JobTitle=’Accountant’)]


Since it is likely that typical installations will use this query pattern we strongly advise customers NOT to turn on the Set Partition feature. We will update the community as we understand the issue more completely and have developed a recommendation for addressing it."

As you can see, it is strongly recommended NOT to turn on the Set Partition feature - and that it cannot be disabled once activated.

You can and should follow the thread in the FIM Forum (including the excerpt) here.