Overview; What Is Staging - Novell IDENTITY MANAGER 3.6.1 - STAGING BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 2010 Manual

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Overview

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1.1 What is Staging

Software products need testing before they are deployed in an IT environment. Staging is a process
of development and testing software products. Staging provides users the flexibilty to validate
applications in real time to ensure uniformity across all stages.
Identity Manager staging is similar to any software deployment process. Nearly all the Identity
Manager projects operate in more than two stages, such as development, testing, and the production
environment.
Staging Movement
Figure 1-1
Figure 1-1 shows a basic representation of the movement of Identity Manager projects across
different stages. Three projects are developed and tested in three individual setups and then
connected in the next stage. The scale of projects grows with stages, but not necessarily the scale of
an individual driver.
Managing the movement of a tested solution across different stages and ensuring that nothing is left
out can be challenging for Identity Management consultants and customers. When Identity Manager
projects are moved from one stage to another, moving driver configurations becomes critical. To
successfully stage Identity Manager projects, certain other configurations must also be taken care of.
Novell Identity Manager Best Practices Staging Guide provides step-by-step procedures to move
your Identity Management solutions from one stage to the subsequent stages. The guide helps you to
reduce complexity in your Identity Manager deployment process, by helping you to test your
Identity Manager project at multiple stages before it is live.
In the following sections, you will find Designer at the center of discussion. As you already know,
Designer is critical to the Identity Manager project development, for developing policies, drivers,
PRDs, and so on. Designer is highly capable of bringing/creating the Identity Manager
configurations required for running an Identity Manager project and then deploying the
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