Policies enable you to customize the flow of information into and out of NetIQ eDirectory for a particular environment.
For example, one company might use the inetorgperson as the main user class, and another company might use User. To handle this, a policy is created that tells the Identity Manager engine what a user is called in each system. Whenever operations affecting users are passed between managed systems, Identity Manager applies the policy that makes this change.
Policies also create new objects, update attribute values, make schema transformations, define matching criteria, maintain NetIQ Identity Manager associations, and many other things.
For more information about policies, refer to the following: