3.1 Designer

Designer is an Eclipse*-based tool that helps you design, deploy, and document your Identity Manager system. Using Designer’s graphical interface, you can design and test your system in an offline environment, deploy the system into your production environment, and document all details of your deployed system.

Figure 3-1 Designer for Identity Manager

Although it is possible to set up an Identity Manager system without using Designer, it is much more difficult and is not recommended.

Design: Designer provides a graphical interface through which you can model your system. This includes views that allow you to create and control the connections between Identity Manager and applications, configure policies, and manipulate how data flows between connected applications.

Deploy: The work you do in Designer is deployed to your production environment only when you initiate the deployment. This gives you the freedom to experiment, test the results, and resolve any issues before going live in your production environment.

Document: You can generate extensive documentation that shows your systems hierarchy, driver configurations, policy configurations, and much more. Basically, you have all the information needed to understand the technical aspects of your system while helping you verify compliance with your business rules and policies.