PSO/Account/ProvisionedState

["Gary Cole" <Gary.Cole@waveset.com>]

If I recall correctly, the IBM proposal based on WSProvisioning had a
separate set of methods to get and set ProvisionedState.  However, the
provisioned state was a single attribute.

I usually think of the state of a provisioned object (such as an
Account) as being more complex.  In the PrOM strawman, the Account class
includes several sets of attributes.  

To identify the account, Account has "target", "name", and "guid"
attributes.  The account is usually associated with some target, has a
name that is changeable, and may have an internal identifier that is not
supposed to change.   

To represent more traditional notions of status, Account has "exists",
"disabled", "disableDate", "enableDate", "expired", and "expireDate".
The "exists" attribute is needed because the PSP may not have created
the account yet (for example, the target may be unavailable, or the
request could be going through approvals), or because the account has
been deleted natively (i.e., without going through the PSP).  The other
attributes are drawn from experience with traditional account sources
(such as Human Resources systems, RACF, Novell, and Unix systems).  Not
all account sources support all attributes, and we could add other
attributes, but these attributes represent common features of accounts.

To represent credentials, Account has "password" and "certificate"
attributes.  Perhaps there should be others, but these attributes
represent common forms of credentials.

Finally (and perhaps most controversially), Account represents
membership and privilege with "organization", "group", "role", and
"right" attributes.  The PrOM draft explains that these attributes
represent only an account's *memberships* in organizations, groups,
roles, and rights defined by the target.  (However, this does not
prevent a PSP from supporting organizations, groups, roles, or rights as
provisioned objects.  Past experience suggests that this can be
difficult, but any vendor is free to do so.)

So, is all of this stuff really provisioned state?  I think so.  With
the possible exception of "target" and "guid", which should not change
once an account is provisioned and the values are known, the other
attributes could be changed through the PSP or natively (i.e., without
going through the PSP).  What is more, an attempt to change one of the
values (e.g., to disable an account) could fail, in which case the PSP
might be expected to remember the requested values and retry the
operation or report the failure.  These attributes represent features of
accounts (provisioned objects) which a PSP is commonly expected to
manage.

So, should this kind of stuff show up in the protocol or in the object
model?  I guess that I'd prefer to see it in the object model, but I
suppose it's more important to me that these kinds of attributes shows
up *somewhere*.  If #getProvisionedState returned these kinds of
attributes rather than a single attribute, I expect that would work for
me.

Why not just leave it "open"?  Why not just let each target expose its
own schema?  Why impose a defined set of attributes?  Interoperability.
I think an RA should be able to ask a PSP to disable an account, or to
schedule its disablement in the future.  I think we know enough about
the domain to define a set of attributes that is generally useful in
managing provisioned objects.  This would in turn make SPML a more
valuable standard.