What's New in Oracle Access Manager?

This section describes new features of Oracle Access Manager 10g (10.1.4.0.1) and provides pointers to additional information within this book. Information from previous releases is also retained to help those users migrating to the current release.

The following sections describe the new features in Oracle Access Manager that are reflected in this book:

• Product and Component Name Changes

• Deployment Overview

• Capacity Planning

• Tuning the Directory

• Tuning the Access Server

• Tuning the Identity System

• Tuning Workflows

• Tuning Your Network

• Tuning Performance for Access System Operations

• Failover and Load Balancing

• Reconfiguring Oracle Access Manager

• Migrating Data

Note:

For a comprehensive list of new features and functions in Oracle Access Manager 10g (10.1.4.0.1), and a description of where each is documented, see the chapter on What's New in Oracle Access Manager in the Oracle Access Manager Introduction.

Product and Component Name Changes

The original product name, Oblix NetPoint, has changed to Oracle Access Manager. Most component names remain the same. However, there are several important changes that you should know about, as shown in the following table:

Item	Was	Is
Product Name	Oblix NetPoint Oracle COREid	Oracle Access Manager
Product Name	Oblix SHAREid NetPoint SAML Services	Oracle Identity Federation
Product Name	OctetString Virtual Directory Engine (VDE)	Oracle Virtual Directory
Product Release	Oracle COREid 7.0.4	Also available as part of Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2 (10.1.2).
Directory Name	COREid Data Anywhere	Data Anywhere
Component Name	COREid Server	Identity Server
Component Name	Access Manager	Policy Manager
Console Name	COREid System Console	Identity System Console
Identity System Transport Security Protocol	NetPoint Identity Protocol	Oracle Identity Protocol
Access System Transport Protocol	NetPoint Access Protocol	Oracle Access Protocol
Administrator	NetPoint Administrator COREid Administrator	Master Administrator
Directory Tree	Oblix tree	Configuration tree
Data	Oblix data	Configuration data
Software Developer Kit	Access Server SDK ASDK	Access Manager SDK
API	Access Server API Access API	Access Manager API
API	Access Management API Access Manager API	Policy Manager API
Default Policy Domains	NetPoint Identity Domain COREid Identity Domain	Identity Domain
Default Policy Domains	NetPoint Access Manager COREid Access Manager	Access Domain
Default Authentication Schemes	NetPoint None Authentication COREid None Authentication	Anonymous Authentication
Default Authentication Schemes	NetPoint Basic Over LDAP COREid Basic Over LDAP	Oracle Access and Identity Basic Over LDAP
Default Authentication Schemes	NetPoint Basic Over LDAP for AD Forest COREid Basic Over LDAP for AD Forest	Oracle Access and Identity for AD Forest
Access System Service	AM Service State	Policy Manager API Support Mode

All legacy references in the product or documentation should be understood to connote the new names.

Deployment Overview

A new chapter has been added to discuss deployment types and tiers, deployment scenarios and environments, deployment categories, and deployment guidelines.

See Also:

Chapter 1

Capacity Planning

The chapter that describes capacity planning has been updated to provide even more helpful details.

See Also:

Chapter 2

Tuning the Directory

• Several enhancements have been made to directory tuning documentation.

  To optimize performance, you should ensure that your directory performance is optimal. In this release, information on directory tuning has been enhanced.

  New guidelines for configuring the directory connection pool size has been added.

  See:

  "Guidelines for Directory Tuning", "Checking the Performance of the Directory".

• This release provides a new parameter for clearing the LDAP connection cache.

  See:

  "Directory Connection Pool Size".

• New parameters enable a component to fail over to a secondary directory server if the primary server takes too long to respond or too long to process a request.

  See:

  "Configuring Failover Based on Directory Server Availability", and "Configuring Failover Based on Directory Server Response Time".

Tuning the Access Server

• Guidelines have been provided on configuring threads and queues.

  See:

  "Changing the Number of Request Queues and Threads".

Tuning the Identity System

• Guidelines have been provided on optimizing directory searches that users perform with the Identity System applications.

  See:

  "Tuning Identity System Searches".

• Guidelines have been provided on optimizing performance of the Group Manager application in the Identity System.

  See:

  "Tuning Groups in the Identity System", "General Recommendations for Tuning Groups in the Identity System", "Guidelines for Working with Large Static Groups", and "Tuning the Group Manager Application".

Tuning Workflows

• There are best practices for optimizing workflow performance.

  To minimize the impact that workflows have on server performance, you can tune various parameters in workflowdbparams.xml. You can also tune various workflow search parameters to enhance performance.

  See:

  "Tuning Workflows".

Tuning Your Network

• There are best practices for optimizing network and Oracle Access Manager performance.

  See:

  "Tuning Your Network".

Tuning Performance for Access System Operations

• If you do not use nested groups in your directory, you can improve group membership searches by turning off nested group evaluation.

  See:

  "Use Nested Groups with Caution".

Failover and Load Balancing

• Information has been added on load balancing of LDAP data.

  See:

  "About Load Balancing of LDAP Data".

• A "heartbeat" polling mechanism facilitates immediate failover to a secondary directory server when the number of connections in the connection pool falls below the specified threshold level. Information has been added on setting the polling interval for failover.

  See:

  "Configuring Failover Based on Directory Server Availability".

• Information on configuring failover for Policy Manager data has been added.

  See:

  "Configuring Directory Failover for Configuration and Policy Data".

Reconfiguring Oracle Access Manager

• You can change basic components that you specified during Oracle Access Manager installation, such as the person object class or the directory server host.

  See:

  "Reconfiguring the System".

Migrating Data

A new application has been released to assist with Oracle Access Manager configuration data migration in Oracle Access Manager 10g (10.1.4.0.1) deployments.

See Also:

Chapter 8