FIM Protocol Docs

I seem to mention these things a lot, but never show where to find them.

The first hint was from Joe Schulman (ex-FIM PM)

As a small part of the the announcement about Office 2010 Technical Preview, Microsoft published the Office 2010 protocol documents. A small and dedicated group of us worked hard and long for these past months to release documents related to FIM’s protocols on time. Of particular interest to this audience may be the FIM web service protocol document.

The protocol documents are part of Microsoft’s earnest commitment to interoperability. More information about this program can be found here.

There happen to be quite a few protocol documents for FIM, each document name starts with “User Profile Synchronization (UPS)”.  Why THAT name?  My guess is that these were published because SharePoint took a dependency on FIM when they delivered their component for User Profile Synchronization.  Anyhow, there is the list:

• [MS-UPSCDAP]: User Profile Synchronization (UPS): Configuration Database Data Access Protocol Specification
• [MS-UPSCDS]: User Profile Synchronization (UPS): Configuration Data Structure
• [MS-UPSCP]: User Profile Synchronization (UPS): Configuration Protocol Extensions
• [MS-UPSDBDAP]: User Profile Synchronization (UPS): Database Data Access Protocol Specification
• [MS-UPSLDAP]: User Profile Synchronization (UPS): Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Version 3 Extensions
• [MS-UPSMODS]: User Profile Synchronization (UPS): Management Objects Data Structure
• [MS-UPSSCXPP]: User Profile Synchronization (UPS): Schema Exchange Protocol Profile

The most interesting protocol document in terms of deployment automation is MS-UPSCDS (Configuration Data Structure) since it details the ma-data and mv-data XML.  Get those right and you can manage the sync engine via the FIM Service, that’s the theory anyway…