In my role as an Identity Management consultant many people ask me where they can get more technical information on Identity Management products. I usually tell people the best way to learn is to get hands-on experience. This is not as easy as it sounds because typically someone who is learning doesn’t have access to a working environment that they have the liberty to tinker with. In this case I suggest building your own environment. I typically use Virtualbox as it is free and a very good virtual environment. As I work mostly with Oracle Identity Management I will typically suggest Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) as the OS. OEL is based on Redhat (although Oracle has just developed their own kernel) so you can get pretty close to Redhat, if you need to, by using OEL instead.
Once you have your VirtualBox client machine installed and the OS installed then you should check out Oracle by Example. They had tutorials on a lot of Oracle’s IDM products. These are step-by-step instructions that will guide you through a basic installation. These are also good if you are stuck on a particular use case and need some guidance on how to configure your environment for something that is not “out of the box”.
Once you have the basics down (installation and configuration) then you can step out and build out modifications based on IDM uses cases that you may have out your organization or some common ones that can be found online (i.e., Cloud-based, SSO w/Google Apps, etc).
Good Luck!
