Great new improvements for SAP IDM

With the latest service pack of SAP Identity Management (IDM) 8.0 SP06, which was released on February 19^th. 2018, SAP made available the latest features and functions that were promised on the road map. Additionally, there were enhancements made available to the eclipse plug-in for SAP Identity Management. These were promised with the customer connection initiative in 2017 and already announced in December 2017.

With this blog I will summarize the enhancements of these two initiatives/releases because the information can otherwise only be found scattered across several SAP notes and the release note. Here you have all the information at one place: the SP06 release AND the results of the SAP customer connection initiative.

Read here about all the enhancements available with SAP Identity Management 8.0, SP06 and the release of the SAP IDM Toolset 8.5.15 for Eclipse at the end of 2017:

• The “Copy & Paste” functionality within the eclipse plugin is further explained in SAP note 2573489. With this, the Copy & Paste functionality should be working consistently in all views.
• SAP note 2569036 explains that it is now possible to check out and check in a package without collapsing the tree view structure and closing of all open views.
• Another enhancement covers the possibility to copy information from a package without the need to check out the package. This is explained in SAP note 2569113.
• Customers complained about “columns not being resizable and hidden values” in the Eclipse Dev Studio: this is fixed and explained in SAP Note 2569114. It is now possible to resize the table columns on the Access Control tab of forms without checking out the package containing the form.
• The next UI improvement is related to the use of mouse and keyboard in the IDM eclipse plug-in, e.g. when entering data into table fields. With this new version it is now possible to do such entries using the keyboard only. See SAP Note 2570734 for details.
• Already delivered with a patch for SAP IDM 8.0 SP05, and also included in SP06 for SAP IDM 8.0, administrators are now able to use the delete functionality using keyboard shortcuts more reliable in SAP IDM 8.0
• One more issue is included in SP06, which was also released as patch for SP05 already in late 2017: it should be possible to access a display task by its taskGuid. This is now possible. See SAP Note 2572463 for the announcement.
• One much awaited improvement is related to the assignment of users to a privilege: It is now possible to do mass assignment of users to a privilege. Previously, SAP Identity Management already offered the possibility for mass assignment of users to roles, but the same functionality was missing for privileges. This is fixed after the upgrade to SP06.
• Several improvements were introduced related to the packaging concept, e.g. regular jobs that are referenced by package constants of type Job Reference can now be monitored and executed, event processes that are defined on entry types and attributes are now displayed as incoming dependencies on the Dependencies tab of a package, and more!
• A new database stored procedure was introduced to help retrying user deactivation. See the release notes for more improvements related to user deactivation.
• Many changes are done to the SAP Identity Management REST Interface Version 2. There is a whole new help section available for this topic. The most important changes are the use of the Apache Olingo library – an OData 2.0 Java library that implements the Open Data Protocol (OData) v2 and the change to HTTPS communication by default. Of course: the long-awaited support of operations like “Create entries”, “Get entry reference history” and “Get entry reference hierarchy” were made available with this enhancement.
• The introduction of new hashing and encryption algorithms include support of AES128/CBC (default for encryption), AES192/CBC and AES256/CBC, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, PBKDF2_SHA1 (default used hashing algorithms).
• Formerly, only standard database users could be created using the SAP HANA connector. Now SAP IDM can differentiate between standard and restricted database users in SAP HANA and it can create restricted users, change standard users to restricted users and change restricted users to standard database users.

Related documents that support this blog:

• SAP Identity Management 8.0 SP06 release notes
• SAP Note 2549584 – SAP Identity Management 8.0 SP06 for known issues
• SAP Identity Management REST Interface Version 2