Designer for Identity Manager is a client-based tool for designing, debugging, deploying, and documenting your identity management solutions. It gives you a full view of Identity Manager in your enterprise and lets you drill down to any level of detail.

Designer contains the following features and we continue to add more:

• enterprise modeling

• configuration

• project versioning and staging

• policy management

• integrated XML/XSLT editor

• data analysis and scrubbing

• debugging, data simulation

Designing an identity management solution is a much smoother experience now thanks to Designer's powerful tool set. With Designer, you can:

• Carry projects with you -work offline and save projects to disk.

• Keep a project open for an extended period of time.

• Work on multiple projects at the same time.

• Experience higher performance -processing is performed on the local CPU.

• Enjoy a smoother interface (fewer clicks, fewer sub-windows to resize or close, etc.).

• Benefit from an included development/debugging environment and integration with other client-based tools (editors, debuggers, etc.).

The fundamental model/paradigm of Designer is to import solutions, configure locally in the Designer environment, and then deploy when a solution is ready. This approach was taken to optimize the experience for

• Off-line work

• Highly-productive development

• A safer model of configuring and testing before touching your live system

As stated, the tool is aimed squarely at developers and architects as the primary audience.

For convenience, Designer lets you do key operations that a developer typically needs to do to be effective: browse live trees, check driver status, start/stop drivers, and configure driver security. Functionality in the Live Operations options take immediate effect on the end systems. These operations are clearly grouped in the Designer UI, so that you can tell if you're doing something live.