Designer is used in Identity Manager project development for developing packages, policies, configuration files, and other objects that make up the configuration of a driver. Designer can create the Identity Manager components required for running an Identity Manager project and then deploy the project on another Identity Manager deployment.
You can use Designer to segregate the Identity Manager environment into separate packages, that can be easily moved from one stage to another. You can use package versioning (for upgrades and downgrades) to effectively move your changes from one stage to another.
Before you begin to use this guide, you should be familiar with Identity Manager and Designer. As you create projects, you should have a uniform Identity Vault design across all the states so that common objects are available. Some objects are moved automatically by Designer, but others should be moved explicitly to make them available in the next stage. See Preparing for Staging for more information.