Development versus production

If you are using FIM Synchronization Service and FIM Service, you are likely in need of a test/development environment. As I will show you later, migrating from test to production is not that hard with FIM.

The problem is to make your test/development environment look as close as possible to the production environment. The problem with FIM in this case is Connected Data Sources. How to get a representation of each CDS in the test environment is a difficult problem.

Ideally, you would have a mirrored environment where all systems are represented. But that's not available to everyone. If you do, you're lucky!

The Company is running the test/development FIM Server parallel to the production environment using the same Active Directory. This gives them some special problems that we will discuss in this chapter.