Hello again!
A lot of our customers are asking ActiveRoles team…well, they do not directly ask “Why it is working so slowly?”or “Is my Celeron 800 with 128 MB of RAM is enough for running 10K environment?”, they rather ask about dull things like deployment, upgrade or operation best practices. Of course, we do not advice to get separate Xeons for each of ARS architectural components and prepared ActiveRoles wiki content for those who are willing to predict possible bottlenecks and design limitations while deploying ARS: http://wiki.activeroles.inside.quest.com/index.php/ARS_Documentation_Home
In spite of the word ‘documentation’ this section contains very useful advices based on the feedback we get from our customers.
Also, if you are looking for hardware resource information consider using resource usage calculator, which is XLS file with some formulas that can help you to find what amount of RAM or hard disk space is required for operating your environment. You can find it on ActiveRoles CD or here: http://wiki.activeroles.inside.quest.com/index.php/ARS_Product_Documentation_-_Resource_Usage_Calculator
I will keep you up to date while we continue to publish performance-related updates on community site.

We are in the process of implementing Feedburner so that we can post views of the postings into the community site located at http://activeroles.inside.quest.com. Once this setup is complete, anyone will be able to get feeds through feedburner that you can put onto their own blog. If you are an activeroles enthusiast and you blog, please support us by adding our feeds to your blog.

This is my first post so far and I before writing it I was in doubt what would be interesting to blog about. Really, there are so many cool things, but forgive me not writing about trendy cloud computing or Iphones
So, let us start with quite old, but still highly effective SPML, which stands for Service Provisioning Markup Language. Almost 2.5 years have passed since adoption of v2.0 by OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/index.php#spml). So what about usage in real life? Well, not so bad as expected. Though identity management armament drive recently begin to slow down, major IdM vendors had adopted SPML, finally. So did IBM, Sun, Oracle and others. Also, SPML remains the effective way of identity provisioning from and to home-grown applications, because it uses simple SOAP communication model and Java developers are pretty happy with SPML toolkit (http://openspml.org/) they can use in their applications.
So what about ActiveRoles? You probably know that we have released ActiveRoles SPML Provider http://www.quest.com/activeroles-server/spml.aspx), but did you know that this provider could be used for provisioning to ActiveDirectory without ARS? Well, actually, it is quite obvious, because SPML Provider is just an IIS web app that uses ActiveRoles ADSI provider (or Active Directory ADSI Provider) for communicating with tagret audience (AD or AD LDS).
Use cases? Take a look here: http://www.quest.com/identity-management/Quest_and_ITIM.aspx
If you have ever tried to develop an adapter for Tivoli Directory Integrator from ground up…do not try doing it again and use the whitepaper!
Integration with other products should not cause difficulties as well, because SPML is quite straightforward, uses standartized messages for provisioning and relies on common web services security methods, like SSL.
Are there any tricky moments? Well, yes, probably
ARS SPML Provider does not support some of SPML ‘verbs’. They are not critical and it is just a matter of time. Also, at some point we run into compatability issue. There is a discrepancy between the main SPML 2.0 specification and the DSML Profile specification (which ActiveRoles SPML provider conforms to). This issue affects only ‘modify’  SPML verb, so if I have ecouraged you to try SPML Provider (haven’t I?) consider looking through samples, located at provider’s sample page. By the way, this page contains demo client and you can easily test how SPML provider works.

That’s about it. Feel free to drop a line for clarification.