Why Edit Forms?

Why customize the default Identity Manager pages, which already provide all the fields that you need to perform actions within the product? Customizing the default forms allows you to better enforce your company’s policies and processes:

• Preserve privacy by limiting the amount of user account information displayed on the screen. You may not want to present all of the information available for a user account depending on who is viewing the information because of concerns for privacy or to reduce the distraction from nonessential information.

• Provide context-specific help on individual fields. This can reduce confusion and calls into your help desk.

• Reduce the distraction of nonessential information for users performing a specific task. Typically, the most effective way to present information is to display only the fields you need to accomplish the current task.

Customizing the default fields in Identity Manager forms allows you to extend and customize the application for your environment. Specifically, you can customize the default forms to:

• Address the specific needs of the users in your organization. This is particularly important when several different types of administrators must access different portions of the same view data and should not view all data attributes. For example, a human resources administrator may need to access a different subset of user account attributes than a help desk administrator.

• Control the display and content of the user account attributes, particularly attributes displayed on the Create User and Edit User pages. These pages contain most of the attributes that need to be controlled.

• Define default values for user view attributes and their associated attributes. For example, you could define a default home directory for a user instead of the administrator having to key in the path.

• Pre-process user view attributes before they are displayed. For example, department or division codes that are stored as acronyms or by numeric ID in your resource can be represented with more human-readable full names to your user.

• Post-process user view attributes data entry. For example, you can automatically create a mail account based on the value of a location field.

• Control screen real estate by positioning multiple fields on one line. By customizing the arrangement of fields in an Identity Manager form, you can make it more closely resemble a printed form or pre-existing web form.

• Define rules for the way hidden attributes are calculated. For example, a user’s email address can be calculated to be the user’s first name, a period, their last name, then the mail domain: joe.user@sun.com