I am continuing with this lovely series about Workspace ONE Access. So far we have been able to install the connector and integrate with the Active Directory. But if you actually log in as a domain user, you might be disappointed, because there is nothing to do with Workspace ONE Access.

There are no applications. Yet. Let’s fix that in this blog post and add a simple SaaS application – Salesforce.

I started this series about Workspace ONE Access almost a year ago. To be honest, there was not a lot of posts regarding this topic so far… And I finally had time to update the previous article about the Identity Manager Connector installation.

With that said we can now move forward and leverage that connector for Active Directory integration. After that, we will be able to build on top of it and integrate with Horizon, use MFA (VMware Verify) or add 3rd party SaaS applications.

If you have a virtual desktop environment running on VMware Horizon and using Workspace ONE Access (previously known as VMware Identity Manager) it might be tricky for the end users to get in, when their passwords are expired and they don’t have access to any other machine in the domain to fix that.

Luckily there is a pretty neat solution for that.

Let’s assume you have a freshly installed on-premise installation of VMware Identity Manager or you have a newly created tenant in vIDM Workspace ONE Access SaaS infrastructure. There is not much this poor appliance can do at this point, right?

You will need to integrate it with some parts of your infrastructure to make it do useful things like Unified Catalog, SSO, Conditional Access, MFA, etc. In this series, I will show you all sorts of integrations and how you should configure them step by step.

The first integration you literally have to do, when you have SaaS vIDM Workspace ONE Access or you deployed your appliances in DMZ is to install a Connector and pair it with your vIDM Workspace ONE Access.

So what is a Connector (to be specific we are talking about the “VMware Identity Manager Connector”)?

VMware Identity Manager Connector provides organizations with the ability to integrate VMware Identity Manager Workspace ONE Access with their back-end enterprise systems.

Pretty obvious, huh? And those backend systems can be Active Directory, VMware Horizon, Citrix XenApp… But let’s start slowly. Let’s get the connector up and running.