[Posted by: Corinna Mosier]
A few years ago, Microsoft acquired a little known company called Zoomit for its metadirectory services product called VIA. This product soon became known as Microsoft Metadirectory Services (MMS) and was release in versions 2.0 and 2.1. With the release of MMS 3.0, Microsoft has officially re-branded the software as Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003. Though the acronym for the product may be confusing to some (i.e. Microsoft IIS), the software is nothing like Internet Information Server.
MIIS is Microsoft's metadirectory services product that can provision accounts across the enterprise and into disparate systems such as Active Directory, NT 4.0, Exchange 5.5, Novell eDirectory, and many others. The ability to provision and manage accounts across the enterprise allows you to keep accounts and even passwords synchronized throughout your company. This is extremely beneficial to organizations that have a multitude of systems that have their own accounts database repository and even more so for companies that are very large and have to constantly add, remove, and modify existing accounts within many systems. In addition, since most organizations rank password resets as the number one call to the help desk, reducing this management burden for the help desk can dramatically reduce costs and overhead within your organization.
MIIS runs on Windows 2003 Server and requires SQL Server 2000 as its underlying database repository. It comes in two different versions: