Forefront Identity Manager 2010 Reaches RTM

Microsoft announced the release to manufacturing of Forefront Identity Manager 2010 on March 2nd, 2010, at the RSA Conference 2010. At the time of writing this article, the Redmond company was already offering a trial version of the latest iteration of the Forefront Identity Manager for download. The promise from Microsoft is that the successor to Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 kicks up a notch enterprise identity management by allowing end users to take advantage of self service capabilities and IT administrators to leverage new tools designed to automate tasks and simplify their administrative work.

“FIM is an important deliverable of the Business Ready Security strategy to help companies manage risk and empower their people. It is a core part of our identity & access management solution, which aims to enable more secure access to both on-site and cloud applications, from virtually any location or device,” a member of the Forefront team noted. “Overall, FIM takes a great deal of cost and inefficiency out of identity management and helps companies boost employee productivity.”

According to Microsoft, Forefront Identity Manager 2010 holds the key for enterprise customers to ensure that their environments are trusted and more secure. Companies that have already embraced the identity solution while the product was in development through Microsoft’s testing programs have discovered that Forefront Identity Manager 2010 indeed makes the job of IT administrators easier. Admins can manage not only user accounts and access, but also password and certificate-based credentials. At the same time, Forefront Identity Manager 2010 allows customers to enforce identity policies across Windows and heterogeneous environments.

“First American Title Insurance Company is using FIM now to automate provisioning and access to business systems for its 14,000 employees. As a result, the company is helping employees more easily get to the information and applications they need, is improving its internal auditing and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and is also reducing help desk calls – for an anticipated annual savings of $66,000,” the Forefront team representative added.

Forefront Identity Manager 2010 RTM is available for download here.