Provides a disconnected mode that enables you to work from your laptop when you’re on the go

Strong visual editors, minimal pop-ups, and well-synchronized views maximize productivity

Powerful window, view, perspective, and tool management

Designer is team-enabled, allowing teams to share work on enterprise-level projects through the Version Control view

Dozens of wizards and builders to help you configure projects and policies

Auto-creation of objects, auto-value, auto-connection, auto-layouts

Strong copy/paste functionality within and across editors

Full keyboard support in all editors

Full undo/redo functionality in most editors and views

Ability to scale the UI from basic to more advanced views

Ability to filter key views to see as much or as little as you need to see

Integrated XML editor with syntax highlighting, auto-suggest, and search and replace capabilities

Very efficient, compact, powerful, and productive off-line schema management tools

Value history on many fields to reduce typing

Many preferences and settings that can help you customize the UI to fit how you want to use Designer

Logs and traces that are easy to access and view

Thorough contextual help and a powerful searchable help system

Quick and easy installation

Auto-update notifies you of any updates and easily pulls them in

Easily add and model something that is not in the shipping version of Designer.

For example, you can add your own applications, drivers, resources, and icons.

Configure Designer to use a different editor.

You can configure all file types (for example, .xml and .txt) to use your text editor of choice. Eclipse-based text editors work best, but you can also include various artifacts (for example, word processing documents and spreadsheets). Your system’s native text editor is automatically integrated into Designer if the platform supports it.

Develop and debug in Java*.

If you install Designer plug-ins into a full Eclipse install, you can perform Java development and debugging, ANT, C#, and UML modeling, all in the same tool alongside Designer. This has particular value to Identity Manager driver writers (Java or C) who want the tools all together.

Use public APIs.

Identity Manager uses fully published public Eclipse APIs as an underlying project data model that is consistent with open industry standards in its format, along with published Eclipse extension points.

With an off-the-shelf Eclipse book and knowledge of our extension points, you should be able to contribute very rich content to Designer. There are books, resources, and forums in the Eclipse community to address most of your needs. For further information, see Eclipse Resources.