Certificate Management is an optional MIM component. MIM CM can be, and often is, used by itself without any other parts of MIM being present. It is also the component with the poorest integration with other components.

You will find that it hasn't changed much since its predecessor, Certificate Lifecycle Manager (CLM), was released.

MIM CM is mainly focused on managing smart cards, but it can also be used to manage and trace any type of certificate requests. This also includes machine certificates, but there is a slight limitation when we move to machine certs. FIM CM was developed around the user context.

The basic concept of MIM CM is that a smart card is requested using the MIM CM portal. Information regarding all requests is stored in the MIM CM database.

The certification authority, which handles the issuing of the certificates, is configured to report the status back to the MIM CM database.

The MIM CM portal also contains a workflow engine so that the MIM CM admin can configure features such as e-mail notifications as a part of the policies.

In MIM, we add new features, which include the modern app for Windows. Also, a new REST API will be introduced, which we will explore and configure in conjunction with the modern app with MIM CM.

During the configuration, we'll explore the authentication and authorization settings in more detail. This will enable you to fully understand the permission model around MIM CM that is required.