About Applications and Connectors

IdentityIQ uses configured applications to connect to your enterprise’s target systems and read data from those applications into IdentityIQ. This data is used for creating/updating Identity Cubes, building IdentityIQ’s entitlement catalog, and bringing information about users' accounts and group membership into IdentityIQ. Many, but not all, applications can also write information back to target systems, to reflect changes made within IdentityIQ.

Although the terms "application" and "connector" sometimes seem to be used interchangeably, it's important to understand the differences:

Connectors are how IdentityIQ provides the base functionality for communication with the target system. Connectors are in essence templates for connecting to target systems. They define how connectivity to the target system is accomplished, provide the ability to connect to a source, to read from and (in some cases) write to the source, and to create a normalized resource object representing the data read from the source.

Applications are configured instances of connectors. They contain specific information for connecting to specific target systems, such as a unique name, connection parameters for connecting to a particular system, and a specific account schema. For example, you may need to aggregate data from several different delimited files. Using the delimited file connector, you can create many unique delimited file applications, each pointing to a particular file, and using a specific schema that defines the data to be aggregated from the file.

Documentation For Specific Connectors

This guide provides general concepts and common practices that are applicable to all connectors. For more detailed information about specific connectors, use SailPoint's connector-specific guides. These guides are available online and in PDF format, and provide details such as supported features, connection parameters, account schema details, and more, for each connector.

Online connector documentation: documentation for the current version of each of the connectors supplied by SailPoint is available online on SailPoint's documentation portal.

PDF and legacy connector documentation: you can download PDF versions of the connector guides from SailPoint's Compass Community. Connector guide PDFs are updated with each patch to IdentityIQ. If you need connector documentation for older versions of IdentityIQ, use the Supported Connectors for IdentityIQ page on Compass; be sure to locate the correct documentation zip file for your specific version and patch.

Additional Resources for Connectors

These other SailPoint resources can be useful sources of additional information on connectors:

Compass – in SailPoint's Compass Community, you can engage with peers and experts to ask questions and share answers, submit ideas, read wiki articles and technical white papers, watch webinars, and more.

SailPoint's Customer Support knowledge base(LINK IN DOC) – you can search here for technical notes about specific connectors, from SailPoint's Customer Support team.