OIM, OID and ADF - Confused!!!

Question

Hi All,
I am starting to read about all this Identity Management stuff and I need some orientation about what to do and where to start since I have been loosing some time trying to understand the whole picture. I know Oracle Internet Directory is part of OIM but I am confused.
We are building a Webcenter Portal application and its security is intended to be managed through an OID (Oracle Internet Directory) which is already settled up and running. Now, the real problem is how to manage users/groups (entries in general) using our Webcenter Portal Application.
We are thinking at first some basics operation like if you are the admin you can create some user, assign roles and groups etc. All this without going to the OID Console. All this within our portal.
I know there are more than one approach I could take. Right now I am thinking to create our customs java classes in order to connect to the LDAP using the provided API. So
- Should I use a simple JNDI interfaces to do this?
- In JDeveloper if I write "OIDUser" in a java class I get a suggestion about the package "oracle.security.idm"... So shall I use this instead simple JNDI? If this is the case, is there any tutorial I can follow in order to achieve this?
- I was taking as example this http://code.google.com/p/ldapchai/ which is an API for LDAP using java jndi. However, this is not an oracle product and more than sure this kind of stuff have been already made by oracle. But exactly something like that I need. I am thinking to implement some interfaces with the following methods
create user
update user
create group
update group
assignUserToGroup
etc.
Hope you guys can help me out here.
Regards
P.S I give points to the useful questions and correct ones as well.
I just came out with this library ldapjclnt11.jar which is in OID_HOME. Shall I go for this since I am not using OIM. Just OID?
Regards
Edited by: Alejandro T. Lanz on Feb 13, 2013 8:15 AM

Answer 1

Hey Alejandro,
Management X Manager both are OIM concepts:
Let's start from the very beginning: OIM is one product that you can control 'user and group resources' as Active Directory users , Database users and OID users and groups. So, OID is not part of OIM(Oracle Identity Manager_). Maybe you are talking about the first concept that comes with Oracle application server , OID, DAS and SSO. All these products were called OIM(Oracle Identity Management_).
OIM is one WebApp deployed into AppServer with some client pieces(eg: Design Console, Remote Manager) , if needed.
OID is one LDAP.
Basically the standard control that you can do here is:
Have these tasks:
1)create user,update user,create group,update group,assignUserToGroup controled by OIM.
2) THen OIM has an 'integration' with OID, using LDAPSYNC or having OID Connector: http://thiagoleoncio.blogspot.com/2013/01/oid-sync-vs-oim-connector-into-oim-11g.html
3) WebCenter Portal is 'connected with LDAP(OID)'.
Regarding this:
We are thinking at first some basics operation like if you are the admin you can create some user, assign roles and groups etc. All this without going to the OID Console. All this within our portal.
I know there are more than one approach I could take. Right now I am thinking to create our customs java classes in order to connect to the LDAP using the provided API.
You can:
1) Do a class that have all ldapqueries to do whatever you want.
2) Do this integration above, then it will be much more easy to do this tasks and no develop part needed from user creation point of view.
I hope this helps you a bit,
Thiago Leoncio.