MMC Errors

I’ve been working with various versions of SAP IDM for 9 years now, back to my days at MaXware.  I commonly tell people “There’s not an error you’ve seen with the product, that I haven’t seen before”  Well I was wrong… Recently users of our project’s current development system were getting the following error, which I had never seen before:

Upon investigation and some support assistance we found that there were multiple definitions of the same data source in the EMSConfig.XML file. As the EMSConfig.XML file is rather important, (it holds many MMC specific settings and configurations from Tools/Options) make sure you back this file up before editing it.

If you’re wondering, I’m using Microsoft’s XML Notepad 2007 to view the file.  Nice tool, renders the XML of EMSConfig.XML much nicer than notepad or notepad++.  Note that there are two EMSDB entries both with a name of Clone.  Also note that one value is populated and the other is not.  After a quick cleanup, the following results:

Everyone can log into the MMC now.  Problem solved!