In July I attended an intensive 4 day course, it was a Novell advanced technical training course run by Salford Software. A product expert flew in from Dusseldorf in order to deliver the course in Manchester. The other delegates included a team from ITV and a team from the Turkish government, based in Istanbul. We learned how to integrate and automate different systems using a product called Novell iDentity Manager. By integrating systems and automating processes so that entirely different systems work together seamlessly cuts down on duplication and automates processes that might otherwise be done manually. An example might be for example a new employee joining an organisation – the organisation will need to enter and maintain details about that employee on a number of different systems such as payroll and administration and the user may need accounts on various systems – getting all of that setup is time consuming and involves duplication. Using iDentity Manager it is possible to link these systems together and automate the processes so that the information need only be entered once and the necessary accounts are created automatically and perhaps emails generated to the appropriate people. This is just a very simple example but demonstrates the advantages. Entire business processes can be automated in this way and systems which are currently entirely seperate can be linked together. The skills gained on this course should prove very useful in the future in integrating and automating systems/processes. Identity Manager is an incredible product that I hope to work with more heavily in the future. Provided you have a good technical foundation I highly recommend you try a Novell ATT course.