OIM 11g Notifications

Notifications are one of the multiple features that were improved in OIM 11g release. The previous limitation of sending text based emails (out-of-the-box emails) only is gone.

Out-of-the-box templates for events like 'Reset Password', 'Create User Self Servic', 'User Deleted' are available and custom templates can be defined and used to send notifications out of OIM.

OIM provides a notification framework based on events, notification templates and template resolver. They are defined as follows:

• Events are defined in a XML file and must be loaded into MDS database in order to be available for use.
• Notification templates are defined through OIM advance administration console. The template contains the text and the substitution 'variables' that will be substituted by the data provided by the template resolver. Templates support HTML and text based emails and multiple languages.
• Template resolver is a Java class that is responsible for providing the data to be used to parse the template, it must be deployed as an OIM plugin. The data provided by the resolver class will be used by OIM in the template substitution variables.

The main steps for defining custom notifications in OIM are:

1. Define the Event that will be used for triggering the notification
2. Define the Template to be formatted and sent
3. Create the Template Resolver class
4. Trigger the event from the relevant spot in OIM

This post explain each of the steps above and give some tips on how to create the notifications.

Configuring Design Console for OIM 11g

In OIM 11g, Design Console still is a required tool for system configuration, custom development and customization. But differently from OIM 9.x, Design Console 11g does not have its own installer anymore. It is installed and configured along with the OIM server installation.

One of the common questions around Design Console 11g is: if there is no installer anymore, how do I get it working on my desktop/laptop without installing the whole Identity and Access Management pack?

This is an easy task and this post describes the steps for getting it done:

1. If you don't have a JDK 1.6 in your laptop, you will have to install it.

2. Run the configuration script for OIM once again. The script is available at $IAM_HOME/bin (where IAM_HOME is the folder where the ‘Identity and Access Management Pack’ was installed). You have to run the ‘config.sh’ that is available at $IAM_HOME/bin folder and NOT the one available at ‘$IAM_HOME/common/bin/config.sh’

3. In the configuration wizard, select ‘Design Console’ checkbox ONLY.

4. In the next screen, enter the OIM server host and port name. The wizard will configure the Design Console files for you