When I talked with Alex Weinert (GPM for Identity Lifecycle Manager) last week, he said that the team had been up past midnight so they could RTM SP2 by the end of March, which they did. Alex also thought it would be a couple of weeks at least before the code actually made its way to the public, but, what do you know, the following appeared in my inbox today:
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Dear Valued MIIS Early-Adopter:
I am pleased to tell you that the final version of MIIS 2003 SP2 is now available for download at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A5F6E8DD-FC60-4A11-9D09-AA0BBA2A617E&displaylang=en.
The Management Agent for SAP will be released separately, however, within a few weeks. A management agent for use in certificate and smart card management will be released along with Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 in May.
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To be clear, this is not Gemini or Raven, or any of those projects whose-names-must-not-be-spoken. Its not even ILM 2006 (although it is the same MIIS code that will be in ILM 2006). SP2 is fundamentally support for SQL 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, some bug fixes, a couple of minor enhancements, and improvements in several MAs as far as supporting later versions of their respective data sources.
Congratulations to the ILM team for getting SP2 out. Yes, its just a service pack, and yes it is long overdue. But the ILM team has been sufficiently reworked that you could consider this their first product ship cycle, and that's an important milestone for every product team. I'm looking forward to ILM 2006 and especially ILM "2'. There is some seriously cool stuff in the pipeline from the ILM team.