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Suitability
Enterprise: Employee
Management of enterprise employees. Requires good RBAC, support for complex organizational structures and entitlements, excellent provisioning capabilities, reasonable reporting and governance
Enterprise: Customers
Management of enterprise customer identities. Requires scalability and good provisioning capabilities. Organizational structure and RBAC are much less important. Governance is usually only an obstacle here.
Cloud
Use of IDM inside cloud service deployments, e.g. integrating applications in SaaS clouds or directly exposing functionality as IDaaS. Requires scalability. At least basic support for RBAC and organizational structure is also required. Multi-tenancy is critical.
Public Sector
Management of identities in the public sector. Usually a good support for organizational structures is required to model organizational structure of public agencies, hierarchy of regions/provinces for citizen identities, etc. Also reasonable support for RBAC, good authorizations and at least a basic governance is required. Public sector seems to be shifting to open source preference therefore a clean open source strategy is also important.
Academia
Management of Identities in the in Higher Education. Requires all types of identities: teachers, students, employees, visitors, researchers, collaborators, visitors etc., Usually support for very complex and parallel organizational structures is required. Ability for a parameterized membership in many organizational units is critical. As is the support for temporal conditions to limit student and visitor access) Clean open source strategy is also crucial.
Architecture
Overall System Architecture
How good is the software architecture from the software engineering point of view. Is the system well divided into subsystems and components? Are there proper abstractions in place (such as interfaces)? Is the structure of the system appropriate and understandable?
Platform
Platform on which the system runs. E.G. specific operating system or hardware-independent platform
Structural Framework
Framework (or other method) which is used to ‘wire’ the system together. Framework that binds the components together and forms the basic structure of the system.
User Interface
Framework
What is this? Programming framework that was used to build GUI. This is crucial as the framework is very difficult to change. It usually means re-writing the entire GUI.
Usability
What is this? How easy is to use the system, how easy is to understand it. Is the system flooding user with information? Does it spread the information in a thousands of confusing tabs? Ergonomy, etc.
Completeness
What is this? Does the user interface provide access to all functionality available in the system?
Speed
What is this? How quickly the GUI reacts to user actions. CustomizationWhat is this? How easily can be the GUI fuctionality be customized.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Provisioning Roles
What is this? Ability to specify which accounts to create when a role is assigned to a user. Ability to define attribute values.
Hierarchical Roles
What is this? Ability to include one role in another role.
Assignment parameters
What is this? Ability to customize each role assignment with parameters. E.g. specify a tenant for which the assigned role applies). The assignment parameters are not part of role definition and neither they are part of user data. The parameters must be part of user-role relation (assignment).
Parametric Roles
What is this? Use parameters from user assignment or from a super role in the role expressions. E.g. parametrize the assignment of role assistant with an organizational unit or locality to which it applies.
Conditional Roles
What is this? Ability to "switch on and off" each role based on an arbitrary condition. Ability to assign temporal validity constraints (role valid from or to a specific date).
Meta-roles
What is this? Roles that can be applied to roles themselves. E.g. ability to sort roles to groups or types (functional,business,IT,…) and specify the synchronization properties for each group using a unified policy (meta-role).
Role ownership
What is this? Assign a role owner who have more privileges over the role, e.g. ability to modify role definition.
Role lifecycle
What is this? Ability to guide the creation, modification and disposal of a role, e.g. using proper authorizations, workflow, approvals, etc.
Role synchronization
What is this? Ability to create groups (or other objects) in the target systems as a reflection of a role. Also ability to create roles as a reflection of arbitrary resource objects.
Organizational Structure
Organizational Units
What is this? Ability to support object that model organizational units such as companies, divisions, departments, projects, workgroups, teams, …
Organizational tree
What is this? Ability to organize organizational units to a tree-like structures, ability to display them and efficiently browse them.
Parallel organizational structures
What is this? Ability to maintain several independent organizational structures. E.g. maintain functional organizational tree and a parallel flat project-oriented structure. Ability to assign the same user to each of them independently.
Organizational structure synchronization
What is this? Ability to create organizational units (or other objects) in the target systems as a reflection of organizational structure. Also the other way around. Ability to transform flat structures to tree structures, ability to reconstruct tree structure from flat string attributes, etc.
Provisioning and Synchronization
Propagation
What is this? Ability to propagate data from the IDM system to the managed systems (resources).
Real-time synchronization
What is this? Ability to synchronize data from managed systems to the IDM on an almost-real-time basis (delay in seconds).
Reconciliation
What is this? Ability to compare data records in IDM and in the managed systems.
Opportunistic synchronization
What is this? Ability of the IDM system to automatically trigger synchronization when needed. E.g. in case that an account is missing when IDM attempts to modify it, when existing account is present when a new account is being created, etc.
Attribute mapping
What is this? Ability to map attribute values between resource objects (object on managed systems) and the objects in the IDM system.
Uniqueness, iteration
What is this? Ability to enforce uniqueness of attribute values (on managed systems) and to iteratively find a unique value, e.g. by trying identifiers in the form of jack001, jack002, …
Provisioning ordering and dependencies
What is this? Ability to enforce proper ordering of provisioning operations. E.g. if an application account depends on existence of operating system account. Also ability to properly pass attribute values between systems. E.g. create e-mail account first, pass the e-mail address value to user attribute, then create an AD account and properly set the e-mail address.
Provisioning notifications
What is this? Notifications that announce success or failure of provisioning operations. Used mostly to deliver initial credentials and to notify system administrators about problems. Support for various channels (e-mail, SMS, …)
Resilience
What is this? Ability of an IDM system to recover from provisioning failures such as timeouts and retries, compensation mechanisms, transactional guarantees, etc.
Entitlements
What is this? Support for management of entitlements on the resource side (in managed systems) such as LDAP groups, AD groups, privileges, ACLs, etc. Ability to display and synchronize them. Also ability to manage membership or association of accounts and entitlements.
Connectors
Framework
What is this? Framework of mechanism used to manage and access provisioning connectors. LDAPWhat is this? Support for LDAP servers.
Active Directory
What is this? Support for Microsoft Active Directory.
Databases
What is this? Support for relational databases.
Generic connectors
What is this? Connectors that can apply to many types of systems. Flat files, CSV, XML, scripting connectors, etc.
Unix connectors
What is this? Connectors for UNIX-like systems such as Linux, Solaris, BSD, AIX, …
HR connectors
What is this? Connectors for HR systems such as SAP HR modules, PeopleSoft HRMS, …
ERP and business applications connectors
What is this? Connectors for ERP systems and various 'business' systems such as SAP ERP (R/3), Oracle applications, …
Cloud connectors
What is this? Connectors for cloud-based services such as SalesForce, Google apps, Office 365, …
Mainframe and mini connectors
What is this? Connectors for mainframe systems and 'minicomputers' such as z/OS, OS400, RACF, …
Other connectors
Connector compatibility
What is this? Can the connectors be used in other systems? Is there a support for legacy connector frameworks?
Connector development
What is this? How easy is to develop a new connector.
Customization
Flexibility
What is this? Overall flexibility of the product: ability to change its behavior to satisfy the requirements.
Popular scripting languages
What is this? Support for Groovy, JavaScript/ECMAscript or other popular scripting languages.
Other scripting
What is this? Support for other scripting languages.
Extensible objects
What is this? Ability to extend existing object types with custom attributes. Ability to use the custom attribute in the same way as built-in attributes. Also ability of the attribute to be properly stored, indexed, displayed in forms, etc.
Generic objects
What is this? Ability to define new object types beyond those that are provided by default. Also ability for these new object types to behave as a first-class citizens.
Generic synchronization
What is this? Ability to synchronize any object with any other object.
Hooks/triggers
What is this? Ability to place custom code to be executed at important points in request processing.
External interfaces (APIs)
Local native API
What is this? Local interface available in a primary language (e.g. Java). The goal is low overhead (local calls) and efficient development (e.g. use of callbacks, asynchronous invocation, etc.)
SOAP web service
What is this? Web service exposed by SOAP endpoint, WSDL definition, XSD schema, WS-Security support, etc.
REST
What is this? RESTful resource-oriented interface with proper structure according to REST architectural style (Fielding) and WWW architecture.
Client library
What is this? A stand-alone component that can be linked to an application code and can be used to conveniently access the IDM system over the network.
Data Storage
Commercial relational databases
What is this? Ability to store data in commercial relational databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, etc.
Opensource relational databases
What is this? Ability to store data in open source relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MariaDB, etc.
NoSQL
What is this? Ability to store data in NoSQL databases.
Self-service
Self registration
What is this? Ability for anonymous user to fill out a registration form which creates a user record. Also ability to control which fields are required, field validation, CAPTCHA, etc.
Edit profile
What is this? A dialog that allows user to change some of their own user profile details. Also ability to control which fields are displayed, which fields are editable, etc.
Password change
What is this? Ability for a user to change his own password (when the user still knows the old password). Also ability to select/filter resources, apply policies, etc.
Password reset
What is this? Ability for a user to reset his own password when the old password is lost. Support for verification mail, security questions, etc.
Account summary
What is this? Simple page that provides easily understandable information about user’s accounts, entitlements, group membership, etc.
Password agents
What is this? Agents that capture cleartext passwords and sent them to IDM for distribution. E.g. agents for Active Directory, LDAP servers, etc.
Other self-service functionality
Security
Authentication
What is this? Flexibility of authentication mechanisms, integration with SSO systems, etc.
Authorization
What is this? Ability to control who can do what. Overall authorization flexibility and architecture.
Fine-grained authorization
What is this? Ability to specify authorization policies on a fine granularity (e.g. on the attribute level)
Delegated administration
What is this? Ability to delegate administrative tasks to specific user groups. E.g. ability to specify administrators for individual divisions, ability to delegate some functions to he call center, etc.
Privilege delegation
What is this? Ability to delegate privileges of one user to another user. E.g. allow one user to take all the responsibilities of another user during a vacation.
Audit
What is this? Ability to record all the operations of the users and the system down to a very fine details.
Workflow
Workflow engine integration
What is this? How well is the workflow engine integrated into the system. Is it natural part of the system or was it added just as an afterthought? Are the workflow action items (such as approvals) reasonably integrated into the user interface?
Built-in approval workflow
What is this? Whether the product contains built-in or default approval workflow and what are the capabilities. Approval process is a usual part of IDM solutions and it is not entirely trivial to implement.
Generic workflows
What is this? Can the workflow be customized? Can any type of custom workflow be plugged into the IDM processes?
Workflow standards
What is this? Does the workflow support workflow standards (such as BPMN)?
Pluggable workflow engine
What is this? How easily can the default workflow engine be replaced? Can the product use a different engine? Or can it invoke remote workflow system instead?
Governance, risk assessment, compliance and forensic
Segregation of duties
What is this? Ability to exclude privileges or groups of privileges that cannot be assigned to the same identity at the same time.
Recertification (attestation)
What is this? Support for regular reviews and re-approvals of assigned privileges.
Role analysis
What is this? Support for automated analysis of privileges aiming at assisted design of RBAC structures. E.g. Role mining, role suggestions, etc.
Reporting
What is this? Support for producing a well-formatted human-readable reports (e.g in HTML or PDF) that contain information from the IDM system and/or the resources. Also ability to easily configure custom report, modify the report design, etc. (Simple data export from a database is NOT considered to be reporting)
History reports
What is this? Support for storage of historical data and ability to analyze them. E.g. ability to report who had a particular role 6 moths ago.
Operation
Hardware resource efficiency
What is this? Systems that consume a lot of CPU, RAM or overload disks will have a low score here.
Reliability
What is this? Whether the system actually works, all the time, reliably, without strange bugs.
High availability
What is this? Ability to work in clusters, geoclusters or other distributed configurations.
Export/import
What is this? Ability to export all system data and import it to a different system. This is useful for configuration management, migrations (dev->test->prod), backup and restore, upgrades and variety of other reasons.
Bulk actions
What is this? Ability to efficiently execute operations on a selected objects in a batch mode.
Logging
What is this? Ability to control what information is logged, ability to log debug and tracing information, whether the log messages are easy to understand, etc.
Documentation
Architectural documentation
What is this? Documentation of architecture, subsystems, components, dependencies, modules, UML diagrams, …
Administration documentation
What is this? Documentation describing system configuration, administration and customization
Developer documentation
What is this? Documentation describing how the system is implemented, how to create plug-ins and other programming extensions, how to contribute to the project, etc.
Community
Version control system
What is this? Where is the source code maintained? Is the history public? What are the technical obstacles to contribution?
Community support
What is this? Publicly shared information, e.g. in mailing lists, wiki, bugtracking, knowledge base, etc. Information that are only accessing for subscribers or behind a paywall are NOT considered to be community support.
Roadmap
What is this? Is project roadmap publicly available? Is product development planning transparent and predictable? Can roadmap be influenced by the community?
Contributions
What is this? Is the code a product of a closed team in a single company or is it a group effort? How many independent groups or developers contribute to the project? This is a crucial aspect because the companies behind open source projects tend to be small and there is still a risk of failure. However if the project has a broad community it is very likely that the product development will continue even if the project founder fails.
Openness
What is this? How much is the project open to the public? Is the product design and architecture discussed in public? The the planning done in public? Is everything done in a clean and transparent open source way?