Unique username generation when creating new user via FIM Portal?

Question

Hi,
Is it possible to create a new user using the FIM Portal, and have FIM create the unique username upon submission of the request in the Portal?
So effectively, when you create a new user in the Portal, the 'accountName' attribute would not be a mandatory field and therefore removed from the GUI using RCDC , and instead be generated based upon the unique AD username rules.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Just my 2 cents worth ... make sure you identify and test the "edge cases" for whatever solution you end up implementing, and don't just assume a solution that works for someone else will automatically work for you in 100% of cases (this is most likely why
this feature is not OOTB, even though most people would want something like this from the get-go).
To be specific, I have implemented option #2 myself with success, after initially implementing option #3 and running into grief with a particular use case (education environment end-of-school year roll-over involving large numbers of concurrent leavers/joiners
in the same import/sync cycle).  To be specific, when implementing a workflow-based solution to do this there is a small but nonetheless realistic chance that 2 user requests being processed in parallel calculate exactly the same AccountName value, and
of course one will succeed and the other will fail ... and of course by default this will fail the entire request.
I solved the problem in my case by adoption option #2 using an approach where I reserved a unique accountName in the MV (downside is that in some cases the user may never end up being provisioned to AD if this is in advance of the actual hire date), thereby
avoiding clashes by getting the FIM Sync Service to control integrity rather than the FIM Service where parallelism is a design feature :).
So just make sure you understand the pros and cons of each approach when deciding what is best for you.  Note that this discussion has come up many times before on previous posts on this forum, and it will be worth looking through these if you are still
in the early stages of formulating your approach.
Bob Bradley (FIMBob @
TheFIMTeam.com) ... now using FIM Event Broker for just-in-time delivery of FIM 2010 policy via the sync engine, and continuous compliance for FIM