What is Identity Management?
Identity management is the single point system from where big organizations can manage all their identity(Users). Basically, Now a days companies having so many servers and it needs to give access to each and every user for all or particular server. Let me put in this way, Suppose very big Health organization, which has several servers, like Active Directory,AS/400,BMC,Sorian,Ticket Server etc. Now they need to give access to particular users particular server like Sorian or need to create account into AD for all users. so every time if you need to create account for give access to particular server, one need to access that server and need to give create user profile there. And now you have 20 or more server and need to create profile on each server for some thousand number of users then how many money company just spending in creating users. And specially when your company is growing so fast. Here you need identity management. Using particular identity management system, Company can create resource objects(which is object for servers like AD..) for each server. Now all the users or employees of the company will be in the identity management system. Now one authorize person will go into the system and will give rights for particular or all servers to all or one users. Its not it but many more stuffs you can do with identity management. Also its not only one way ,that means even if you are creating account in particular server then it will automatically create one in identity server. For that you need connectors

What is Connector?
Connector is basically Java Code which helps Identity management to talk with other servers. Most of the common server has OOTB(out of the box) connector which means servers like AD,AS/400 etc already have connector and you just need to import xml files which comes with each connector and copy some of the jars. If some of the server do not have OOTB connector then Java Developer can create one and attach with identity management. When you are creating Connector then You need to create 2 Java files,One for provisioning which will talk with particular server and create account in the server, another will reconciliation(Recon) code which will basically talk with server's database and fetch all the account.

What is Resource Object?
As I told earlier, In Lehman terms,Resource object is basically one object for one server. The Server could be any server where you are creating account. Here I am just referring terms according to Oracle Identity management(OIM).It could be different in different IDM.

What is Adapter?
Adapter is basically Java class but in OIM you user adapter factory and add your Java code and it calls adapter. But here you one more advantage is that you can use logical function which is in build with OIM. There are different types of adapter which we will talk in adapter section.

What is Process Definition?
Process definition is stack of process task. Each process task will do separate functions. Process Task status should be completed for process to be completed. Process definition tells how the particular resource should be processed.

What is Standard Approval and resource or object approval?
Standard approval process come OOTB with oim but when you create your own approval using process definition and select type as approval that basically referred as resource or object approval.