Thursday, June 28, 2007

How to Change the ITIM Home Page

A few people have sent me e-mails looking to know how to change the Home Page that users see when logging into the ITIM Management screen.

This is pretty easy although not that obvious how to do it. A colleague of mine Scott Hammons and I were talking about it this morning and we decided to throw up a few screen shots with instructions on Scotts blog. If your interested, here is the link to the instructions:

http://scottswebblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-to-change-default-page-in-itim-46.html

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Anybody searching for Passlogix?

OK, I have not worked with the TAM ESSO product for very long, but what seems to be quite common when deploying it is having to install, uninstall, and re-install the product a few times as you blow up your test systems trying out templates and MSI files. What is the deal with software that does not uninstall completely?

Every time you uninstall TAM ESSO, you have to go into the Registry and search all over for "passlogix" and delete all these keys manually. You would think by now that someone would get something right with this Windows OS.

Stand-Alone configuration for TAM ESSO

I recently have been doing some work with TAM ESSO. Pretty cool product from Passlogix. The idea is that if you have many applications that users have to remember names and passwords for both client/server, web apps and even terminal applications you can use TAM ESSO to manage the user credentials for each of those apps. When you login to Windows, you must also login to TAM ESSO. TAM will detect when you attempt to access an application that requires a name and password and will login for your so that you are not prompted. Administrators can build templates for all the corporate apps and deploy these templates on an Active Directory Server. AD group membership can then be used to control who has access to which templates.

One of the problems I encountered early this week was in trying to deploy the TAM ESSO client stand alone while including the templates for applications in the stand alone client. The documentation is not very clear on a lot of things including this one so I figured I would go ahead and mention what I had to do.

First I had created templates for 3 applications (Web, Client/Server, and Terminal). Next, you need to click on Global Agent Settings and if you haven't already done so, Import from Live HKLM. Next, open the End-User Experience -> Environment key and select the check box for Location of entlist.ini file. Specify the path to the file including the file name. The default is:

C:\Program Files\Passlogix\v-GO SSO\Plugin\LogonMgr\entlist.ini
















There are numerous settings that can be controlled here so make any other settings you desire to be packaged in the distributions MSI.

Next, to create the MSI click Tools -> Generate Customized MSI. Complete the fields similar to the following screen shot:



















The BASE MSI file should be stored in the location where you extracted the TAM ESSO binaries. You can store your target MSI where you prefer. Obviously if you want applications templates to be included in the MSI then you will want to add the ones necessary for your purposes. The one part that I was not aware of until working with some other TAM folks was the Global Agent Settings. This must be done in order for the application template show up in the client agent. Once you click OK, your distribution MSI is complete.

This is definitely not one of the more complex areas of working with TAM ESSO, but it was a bit annoying when the documentation did not seem to spend much time on a stand-alone implementation. For folks who just simply want to try it out to get an idea how it works, there will not necessarily be an AD server or even ADAM for that matter.h

Monday, June 11, 2007

Time Flys when you're busy

The last time I posted here was April 20. So what the heck have I been doing since then? I guess piling up a long list of things to blog about. So here's what I've been up to:

1.) Implementing the Notes Adapter for ITIM
2.) Implement new ITIM Self Care App and configure SSO with TAMeB
3.) Implementing the AD Adapter for ITIM
4.) SSO Between TAM WebSEAL, WebSphere Portal, and Domino (TAI++ vs LTPA)
5.) Attended a handful of sales engagements between NY and Boston
6.) Install and Test TAM eSSO
7.) Implement TIM in a High Availability configuration using WAS Network Deployment and HACMP clustering with AIX.
8.) Work on TAMeB WebSEAL Clustering and HACMP clustering for TAMeB
9.) Implement TIM Self Registration app from ITIM Examples.
10.) Pass the ITIM 4.6 Certification Exam

What I aim to do is post some more detail about these experiences in the coming weeks. It's tough when you spend most evenings actually working. The blog always takes a back seat. Also, now that the weather is nice here in Buffalo, I have to take advantage of that and cross off all the items on the "honey do" list. I just had a large patio poured behind my house. It's nice, but I've had to spend the last two weekends landscaping it. I figure maybe two more weekends before I'm done. I can't seem to convince my wife that I should be keeping my blog up to date instead of landscaping.

Anyhow, more on these topics later!