Sometimes it may be useful to see the results of an export prior to the execution. You could also use the resulting xml file to trigger a script or for the script to take some action based on the results of the xml after it is parsed.
In this customer situation many accounts were set to be deprovisioned in Active Directory. We created a drop file so the actions performed were populated in an XML file to see the results of the export on these objects. From the drop file we determined that these accounts were in fact in a "terminated" state and the export was going to move the user objects to a TerminatedUsersOU
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16" ?> - <mmsml xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/mms/mmsml/v2" step-type="delta-import"> <directory-entries /> </mmsml> "I didn't have any changes in this run"
The generated raw XML file is far easier to read as transformed HTML, which can then be manipulated in MS Excel if need be ... and I have an XSLT which will do this for you, and will post it on The FIM Team Community Web Site shortly