Ability to connect a Master Data Management solution with IS¶

What is MDM?¶

Master Data Management (MDM) is a solution to compact the data that is accurate and consistent, in a unified location. This MDM solution helps the organization with avoiding redundancy, better decision making, regulatory compliance, improved efficiency, etc.

How WSO2 IS consolidates user information¶

WSO2 IS acts as a central place to create, maintain, and operate user identities and it is enriched with user information. This user information helps MDM solutions to improve their 360 view of customers and hence, improve the quality of data. WSO2 IS gathers user information in different ways.

Authentication the users with external identity providers helps to enrich customer information in several ways. Providing the social login capabilities can help the organization to learn the interests and activities of users. In addition to default connectors such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, generic Open ID providers, generic SAML providers, Twitter, and Office365, IS also provides the flexibility to write custom authenticators based on the providers.

Furthermore, WSO2 IS has user stores that store the details of local users. It provides the flexibility of plugging different user stores according to your requirements thereby improving the 360 view of customers in different ways. Since WSO2 IS is consolidated with user information, MDM solutions can take more accurate and cleansed data when this data is integrated with MDM.

How to integrate an MDM with WSO2 IS¶

How data can be pushed to an MDM¶

Outbound provisioning talks about provisioning users to external systems. There are different outbound provisioning connectors supported by IS to push the user data from WSO2 IS to an MDM solution. This is an effort that helps an organization to create a primary data source in a single location and manage it.

Support outbound provisioning connectors

WSO2 IS supports the following outbound provisioning connectors by default. - SCIM - SPML - SOAP - Google Apps provisioning API - Salesforce provisioning API

In addition to this, WSO2 IS provides the capability to write custom provisioning connectors according to specific use cases.

The SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) 2.0 provisioning connector enables you to provision users using SCIM REST calls to the WSO2 Identity Server. Since it is a standard protocol, user information can be provisioned to the MDM via SCIM APIs as long as the MDM supports SCIM calls.

Since WSO2 IS provides the flexibility of configuring a custom provisioning connector, we can write custom outbound provisioning connectors based on the MDM.

In case the MDM does not support the data format of the request sent by IS, we can use some mediators such as ESB to mediate and transform the data.

Provision data and events using ESB

In case MDM does not support the data format pushed by IS or if IS and MDM does not support any common protocols, we can plug ESB as a mediator to push the data from IS to MDM and map the data between IS and MDM.

ESB has built-in support for data mapping (JSON -> JSON, JSON -> XML etc) and has a dedicated mediator for that purpose. For each event, we can have an endpoint in ESB to pass the IS data to the ESB. Using ESB, we can map the data into the desired format of the MDM vendor and call it. We can also switch protocols within ESB if needed.

How data can be extracted by MDM from WSO2 IS¶

WSO2 IS supports SCIM (v1,v2) APIs, other REST APIs, and SOAP APIs. If MDMs have any SCIM connectors, they can extract the user data from IS using SCIM. When MDM sends any standard SCIM request, IS can respond with the user information.

Since WSO2 IS supports REST and SOAP APIs to get user information, MDMs can easily get the user information as a JSON or XML response. WSO2 IS has user management SOAP APIs, and if the MDM has the capability to call the SOAP APIs to extract user data, then IS can respond to the user information as an XML response. Most of the MDM solutions have REST API support and can call the user management REST api to extract/get and manage the user information.