When Oracle introduces ICF in OIM 11g R1 PS1 then few
questions which might have come to everyone’s mind:
- What is ICF?
- How it is related to OIM?
- Where will we use it?
- Why should we use it?
- Would it be hard to build?
- Would it be hard to learn?
Same questions came to my mind as well. After couple of
months, finally I got some time to write a blog entry on this.
ICF is nothing but Identity Connector Framework. It’s not a
new name in the world of information technology. It’s a connector (not exactly a connector
itself, we can call it as a methodology) which can be used to integrate separate
applications together or which can be used to build different connectors for
different target systems. It is an independent piece of code which can be used
anywhere.
It has two parts, Connector SPI and Connector API. SPI
consists of different interfaces which can be implemented when we build ICF
APIs.
In OIM, we have to write different custom connectors for
Provisioning and Reconciliations. We can leverage ICF Features while creating custom
connector with less efforts. Few OOTB connectors are also available with ICF like
GoogleApps, Database User Management, OID, OUD etc.
It takes very less time to build custom connector as compare
to our legacy methods. It comes with other benefits as well which I am going to
explain in a separate blog entry. Nothing
is hard to learn, it’s just a matter of time. I am sure when you start using
it, you’ll love it as it saves so much time while building the OIM components.