My agenda for Thursday started with Compliant Identity Management with SAP NetWeaver Identity Management and SAP Business Objects GRC Access Control: Best Practices and Lessons Learned. This session was given by a team of presenters from SAP Intelligence Platform and NetWeaver Regional Implementation Group (RIG), who made it clear up front that they are IdM people, and advised us that questions about the GRC solution need to be directed to the GRC folks. That is frequently a frustration to me and other customers, who have questions about how the solutions work together which involve both solutions. The presenters offered two business scenarios for deployment. The catch is that the recommended practice, central provisioning, works optimally when you have nothing deployed today; however, as one customer inquired, if you already have the GRC solution deployed and want to move provisioning to the IdM solution, all of the workflows that you built out in GRC are a lost effort, since they cannot be imported into IdM. I look forward to seeing more emphasis on integration of the two products and scenarios for deploying into existing landscapes that are not clean slates.
Next up was my second hands-on session, Approval Workflows with SAP NetWeaver Identity Management 7.1. This session was led by a team from SAP Intelligence Platform and NetWeaver RIG and SAP Technology Solution Management. I'll have to confess that I found this session very challenging; no doubt, some of it was my lack of familiarity with the icons and navigation. However, I saw a number of other participants struggling and some even giving up. Perhaps part of my challenge was that I found the assumptions of the processes foreign to me as a security administrator. As an example, a number of us in that session found it very odd that in this solution, the creator of a role is the default role owner; out in the real world, that would almost never be the case. I somehow completed the first half of the exercises before I needed to leave, and I took it as a victory.
Then it was time for a quick photo op and lunch break; while at lunch I had the good fortune to catch up with SAP's Sue Martin, who chatted with me about upcoming changes to the SAP certification program. She was very eager to hear a customer perspective, and I found the new initiatives very promising. After lunch it was the BITI Networking time in the ASUG Clubhouse. I enjoyed helping people sign up for logon IDs on ASUG.com and answering their questions about ASUG membership. I wish I had seen more of our regular ASUG SIG members here at TechEd but I was glad to see new members joining the fold.
A Customer Roundtable on Security and Identity Management, with Gerlinde Zibulski of SAP Labs was my last stop of the afternoon. Her colleague Suresh Ramakrishnan from SAP Solutions Marketing joined us, and we had a very informal discussion of take-aways from TechEd and next steps for security influence in ASUG.
It's hard to believe that our week at TechEd is almost over. After another full day, I'm looking forward to some relaxation and fun this evening!
