SAP Identity Management (SAP Identity Management) provides central role-based identity management for provisioning user and access data within your heterogeneous system landscape. It enables you to control all identities within your organization, not only for employees, but also for contractors, customers, partners, and other identities that need to access your organization's applications.
SAP Identity Management can connect to any number of different applications and ensure that the identity information is updated correctly in each of these applications. It provides a unified view of the virtual identity of the users.
In addition to central user provisioning, SAP Identity Management offers the following functions:
Approvals workflow
A Web-based workflow that defines an approval process based on business rules and policies to assign and maintain access rights for users across multiple systems.
Rules- and roles-based provisioning
The use of roles to assign privileges to users.
Password management
The provisioning of passwords including a password-reset self-service for users and password synchronization across all connected target systems.
Audit and monitoring
A centralized reporting function for compliance and auditability
Standards-based support for identity federation
A feature enabling cross-company identity management scenarios and integration with SAP Single Sign-On.
The architecture of SAP Identity Management consists ot the two main components:
Identity Center
This is the primary component for identity management. Identity Center uses a centralized repository, called the identity store, to provide a uniformed view of the data, regardless of the data's original source.
Virtual Directory Service
This component logically represents information from a number of disparate directories, databases, and other data repositories in a virtual directory tree. You decide which views of the information different users and applications can access.
SAP Identity Management is integrated with SAP Business Suite software, for example, the SAP ERP Human Capital Management solution. Depending on your SAP Identity Management release, you can integrate SAP Identity Management with the SAP Business Warehouse component or the SAP BusinessObjects Access Control application.
For more information about SAP Identity Management, see the Help Portal at http://help.sap.com/nwidm .