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Overview
In direct provisioning, OpenRegistry would expose a pluggable API for connectors. This framework would allow connectors to various systems (Google Apps, Active Directory, etc) to be added to OpenRegistry independently of OR development.
Direct provisioning allows OR to get immediate feedback about a user's state on a system. If an error occurs in provisioning, OR will know about it immediately. If a user needs to have an account removed, it can happen immediately. Direct provisioning works better
Sun/Oracle Identity Connector Framework
Commercial IdM offerings have offered connectors for a long time, but they have issues. It's expensive to keep them up to date with new releases of downstream systems. Connectors were usually closed source which made them hard to adapt to your specific situation. Lastly, connectors weren't isolated from each other which led to issues with incompatible libraries being loaded.
Sun Identity Framework aims to solve the above issues. Oracle seems interested in continuing the work done on the framework. OpenRegistry could get a lot of free integration points by adopting the framework and its community