MidPoint Book: Chapter 5

More than a year ago we have published the first version of a book about midPoint. It was our Christmas present to midPoint community. Although the book is not finished yet, we have decided to publish it anyway. The book follows the same evolutionary approach as midPoint development does. It is improving its incremental steps. And now it is time for the next step. Therefore we have published new version of the book with a brand new chapter.

Even the first version of the book already had a lot of useful advice how to get started with midPoint. There is an introductory chapter providing a comprehensive overview of the identity and access management technologies. Then there is an introduction to identity management and midPoint. This is really interesting especially for people that are new to identity management. But it can get the attention even of the identity management experts. MidPoint being a second-generation system brings a slightly different approach to the practical identity management than most first-generation products. Chapter 4 of the book guides the reader through the basic midPoint setup for identity provisioning. All of that was available since December 2016.

Now there is a brand new chapter about identity synchronization. The book explains midPoint synchronization and reconciliation mechanisms in details. There are several practical examples of midPoint synchronization setup. New concepts that are necessary for synchronization are introduced such as midPoint tasks and deltas. Resources, mappings and expressions are further explained. This chapter is a natural continuation of the book.

The book is more than 170 pages long now. It is the perfect starting point for new midPoint users. The book is available for free under the terms of a Creative Commons license. However, it is far from being finished. The next chapter to write is about midPoint role-based access control (RBAC) which is where the midPoint story gets really interesting. And there are many more chapters to be written: templates, organizational structure, authorizations, workflows and many more. However, writing the book is a lot of work and it takes time. And as all work it needs funding. Evolveum has funded the work on first five chapters of the book. Now it is the time for the community to provide funding for next chapters. If you read through the book and found it useful please consider contributing the money needed to write new chapters.

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