Oracle Identity and Access Manager 11g for Administrators [Paperback]

If you are looking for a resource that complements existing Oracle Access Manager (OAM) documentation, with detailed use cases and deep explanations of hard to understand concepts, and troubleshooting tips, this is not that book.

I've been working with Oracle Access Manager for a few years, so I came into this book already possessing a fair bit of knowledge. With that background, this manual is sadly underwhelming. I had much greater expectations for value-add, but all it does is redeliver information that is in Oracle documentation. I could think of many places where the author could contribute by offering advice on how to architectural best practices, or describing complex usage scenarios or tasks that are otherwise hard to find or follow in Oracle's documentation, but there was nothing like that. No discussion about third-party directories (something that is VERY hard to do with the original version of OAM 11g), or DMZ and high-availability configurations (things that are buried in Oracle's documentation but vital for any production deployment).

There is the occasional tip here and there, but they are very few in number, and usually among the more obvious of errors/fixes.

The book was written to coincide with the original release of the product suite, which is a bit of a problem, because a lot has changed since then. The first patchset was released in May 2011, and many features have been revamped and UIs modified. There are one or two mentions of these changes, but the author does not go into detail, leaving the reader to figure out how the old functionality maps to the new one, and resulting in some very confusing and inaccurate sections. There is still no errata covering this on the publisher's web site. Six months of silence on this is way too long a delay, in my opinion. For what it's worth, though, the book is so short on architectural details, that many of the fundamental architectural changes are barely discussed anyway. I'm not sure which is worse.

The author spends a lot of time rehashing the flow of basic administrative tasks, but there is no explanation of what the administrator is actually doing (relative to the product's inner workings, OR the enterprise network) and why. That kind of documentation has the potential to produce a less-agile administrator who doesn't know the right questions to ask when given a request, doesn't know how the pieces fit together to alter instructions or his or her own customized configuration, and can't troubleshoot problems when things go wrong.

In some chapters, all the author really did was summarize existing documentation from Oracle's support site. But because so many details are omitted, the summary is actually more confusing than the documentation itself. Taken on its own, this would likely result in more questions and more service calls than the opposite.

To be fair, the book is not factually inaccurate -- despite the fact that the title of the book misspells the name of the product suite ("Oracle Identity Manager" and "Oracle Access Manager" are two separate products; while the suite is called "Oracle Identity and Access Management") -- but neither is it particularly helpful. The only audience likely to find value in this book is IT managers who need a very rudimentary understanding of Oracle's identity and access management architecture, so they can decide whether to buy it and what they'll need to implement it, BUT don't intend to use the book to actually follow instructions for implementation. Even though there is virtually no original material, it does at least collapse a subset of material spanning a handful of manuals into one place. But the reader is likely going to need to supplement with Oracle documentation anyway, so it's not clear this benefit is worth the cost of the book.

I have expected a bit more indepth content on some of the topics. On a few the topics the book does provide only an overview but is definitelly not enough to administer such an environment.

Some of the pictures are repeatedly used. Some of the command line output pictures are barely readable because they were made using colour but the book is only printed in black and white.

Some text is only copied and pasted in various places on similar descriptions. For instance the description for provisioning a user using a connector is repeated 3 times for - even though it contains basically the same text.

In summary: The book provides a good overview. But it does not go into great detail.

This is a good introduction to the topic and the myriad of Oracle's Identity and Access Managemement products, which are extremely confusing to those with non-Oracle backgrounds or those outside of the organisation.

However, the book is unfortunately mis-titled. It isn't a book about Administering any of the products or solutions, nor about how an organisation should go about identifying, planning and deploying an Identity or Access Management solution.

Its basically a guide on how to install the products and build your own environment based upon the current (11g Release 1) version. This is unlike other books available which apply to older versions (9i and 10g), from which some products have been completely re-written (e.g. Identity Manager).

The book's strong value is that is summarises Oracle's substantial, confusing and poorly installation guides into one which is more palatable for those new to the vendor or product set, and adds a little bit of configuration on how to get each component to talk to each other (e.g. Identity Manager with Access Manager). It is basically built from the author's tutorials available on the internet, but with additional explanation and experiences by walking through the installation process.

But it is not an overall guide for administering an Oracle IdAM solution. By all means purchase this book if you are new to the topic and interested in Oracle's "take" on Identity, or come from another technology stack (IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Sun) and need to know how to quickly build your own sandpit environment without wading through Oracle's massive documentation set, but otherwise it just doesn't hit the mark.