News

Microsoft Releases Identity Manager Service Pack 1

• By Kurt Mackie
• 10/07/2016

Microsoft this week released the first service pack for its Identity Manager 2016.

SP1 reached "general availability" status today, Microsoft announced, which means that it's ready for commercial deployments. The new service pack delivers hotfixes requested by customers plus a few product enhancements, including support for Microsoft's 2016-branded server products.

MIM 2016 is Microsoft's premises-based identity management product that was released last year. It's the successor to Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2, and features "hybrid" identity management capabilities in conjunction with the Azure Active Directory service.

The new service pack for MIM 2016 now adds support for "SQL 2016, Exchange 2016, Outlook 2016 and SharePoint 2016," according to the announcement. A full supported platforms list can be found in this Microsoft document.

MIM 2016 SP1 also has support for Windows Server 2016 in many cases, although support is currently lacking for certificate management and Bhold features. The Bhold Suite is acquired role-based access control technology. It seems mostly associated with the older Forefront Identity Manager product.

Microsoft is also touting support in MIM 2016 SP1 for the Exchange Online service. Messaging support had previously just been available when using Exchange Server product or messaging systems that used the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

The new service pack also broadens browser support for users interacting with the MIM online portal, which is used for "self-service group and profile management." SP1 adds support for the Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari browsers, according to Microsoft's "What's New" in SP1 document. The file formats of images uploaded to the portal now get validated, too.

On the deployment side of things, Microsoft added "menu-driven PowerShell scripts to automate the configuration and deployment of MIM in a Privileged Access Management environment, also known as a bastion forest," Microsoft's announcement explained. Privileged Access Management is feature in MIM 2016 that limits IT personnel network access privileges. With SP1, it's possible to specify users and groups in a privileged ("PRIV") forest, according to the "What's New" document.

Organizations need to have MIM 2016 installed first in order to upgrade to SP1. Microsoft provides the install instructions (and caveats) at the end of the "What's New" document. There's also a detailed walkthrough guide in this Microsoft blog post.

MIM 2016 SP1 can be downloaded from the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center site. It's also available for MSDN subscribers via the MSDN download page.