Sun  Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 just released.

The 7.0 release is a new version for Directory Server Enterprise Edition.

Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 allows companies to grow faster and easier. The significant improvement in performance allows companies to accelerate their applications while reducing their total cost of ownership. Companies can reduce cost by improving serviceability with faster import times, new easy upgrade in place, and with the only solution in the market that gives customers a directory server, virtual directory, proxy server, web console and synchronization with Active Directory available all in one license.

This updated release improves overall quality and robustness of deployments. Among other features, by downloading DSEE 7.0 you will get:

• Up to 3 time performance improvement
  
• In place upgrade from previous DSEE 6 versions
• Reduced disk space and memory footprint
• Optional Data compression
• Instant Restore capability
• Advanced tuning capability
• More use cases and increased performances with views through Directory Proxy Server virtual directory capabilities
• Improved control over traffic going through Directory Proxy Server
• New distribution algorithm with Directory Proxy Server
• Updated list of supported Operating Systems as well as IP v6 supported on all platforms
• Directory Service Control Center supported on broader list of application servers

Release Notes are available from here. Full documentation is available from here.

Information on Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition are also available on: www.sun.com/dsee.

You can download Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 software from the following location:

http://www.sun.com/software/products/directory_srvr_ee/get.jsp

The download page serves as a starting point to direct you to the proper downloads depending on the distribution type you need to download.

Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 is available in the following full distributions.

• ZIP Full distribution (Solaris, OpenSolaris, Red Hat, SuSE, HP-UX, Windows) - standalone delivery to install Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0. For upgrade from 6.x please refer to Installation Guide.

• Native SVR4 packages for Solaris. For upgrade from 6.x please refer to Installation Guide.
  

Identity Synchronization for Windows is not delivered in the Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 distribution and have to be selected from the download page: http://www.sun.com/software/products/directory_srvr_ee/get.jsp

Directory Server Enterprise Edition
Marketing Team

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The  Sun Identity Management team will be giving a webinar next Wednesday to discuss the very important topic of Identity Management and healthcare.  As the healthcare legislation moves through congress the increase of 36M patients on healthcare providers, insurance companies, and patients will be profound.  The cost savings projected by the bills will rely on IT systems to provide increased access to information to drive productivity gains.  As we have seen with recent high profile identity security breeches at hospitals identity security is critical in making sure the right people have access to the appropriate information, that information must be shared with all members of the value chain securely.

Sun's Identity Management Suite provides a powerful package of solutions to help with storing identity information with Directory Server Enterprise Edition;  managing authorization, federation and web services security with OpenSSO; providing provisioning solutions with Identity Manager; and, defining and managing role based access control with Role Manager.

Join this free Webinar to learn how Sun's identity management solutions can help your organization to:

• Automate management of digital identities for other providers, patients, physicians, clinicians, and payors Provide single sign-on (SSO) and secure federated access to privacy-regulated healthcare information while adhering to strict mandates
• Enable delegated, self-service password management
• Comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), internal security policies, and corporate governance policies with complete auditing and reporting capabilities

Sun identity management solutions make it easier for healthcare organizations to manage and share digital information.

Register here.

Topic:	Topic: Sun Webinar Series - Identity Management for Healthcare
Date:	Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Time:	10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT / 19.00 CET (check my timezone)
Duration:	1 hour
Speaker:	Sun Product Manager Suresh Sridharan

SAVE THE DATE - Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Sun Identity Management User Group Session
Grammercy Park Room
Sun Microsystems, 101 Park Avenue, New York, NY

The Sun Identity Management User Group will meet for its next session at Sun Microsystems, 101 Park Avenue, New York, NY on Wednesday, December 2, 2009. 

We are still finalizing the agenda and we will publish in this blog as soon as it is ready. 

Register here

Here are a couple of pictures from a user group in London.  Etienne is doing the presentation on Directory Server.

Next week, Nov. 9-11, the Identity Management Team travels down to Gartner Identity Access Management conference to showcase two of our latest releases DSEE 7 and Role Manager 5.  Gartner IAM is a great event because it not only gather's together experienced practitioners in the identity management space but has a number of events that are small enough that you can have quality conversations about real problems.  Last year, Verizon presented at this conference on the Directory and OpenSSO implementation that serves 50M users.  The presentation is a great example of the proven expertise that Sun brings to Identity Management and the proven extranet scale our products can support---not a marketing benchmark.

Our team has taken a different approach to this even this year and we are participating in Gartner's Learning Lab's.  Vendors, customer's and identity specialists are encouraged to come-by in a classroom style and learn about specific problem's Sun's product, partner's and customer's are doing to solve their identity business problems.  This is crucial today as the cost of failure or doing nothing rises exponentially.  The best way to ensure success is to learn from real-world implementations not marketing based slideware presentations.  This is why we have assembled not just the product teams but partners and real customer's to share their experience in these "learning labs".

The other great thing about Gartner IAM is that there are usually a few different ways to combine great industry expertise and a little fun.  On Tuesday, Nov. 10 at 9:00pm you can meet the Sun Identity team at the Hard Rock Rooftop bar for drinks and conversation.  The first 50 people get a wristband for free drinks.  Identity management isn't hard so come to the Hard Rock to find out how to make it easy! 

Gartner IAM Sun Schedule

Monday, Nov 9th

Learning Lab:

12:40 - 1:05pm “Increase Speed & Performance while reducing TCO with Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition” Speaker: Nick Wooler, Sr Product Manager – Sun Microsystems

1:05 - 1:30pm “Changing the Rules of the game; Raising the bar with Rule Life-cycle Management and closed-loop remediation” Speaker: Neil Gandhi, Sr Product Manager – Sun Microsystems

1:35 - 2:00pm "IAM Governance, Risk and Compliance -- the future of IAM", Speaker: Sachin Nayyar, President - BrinQa

2:05 - 2:30pm "Enterprise Single Sign On for Sun Identity Management", Speaker: Stephane Fymat, VP of Strategy and Product Management - Passlogix

Sun Booth:

12:30 - 2:30pm Daniel Raskin showcasing OpenSSO

12:30 - 2:30pm Mat Hamlin showcasing Identity Manager

Tuesday, Nov 10^th

Learning Lab:

12:10 - 12:35pm “Role based user provisioning; using business roles for identity life-cycle management and identity auditing”, Speaker: Mat Hamlin, Sr Product Manager, Sun Microsystems

12:35 - 1:00pm “Three tough challenges, one powerful solution: OpenSSO for web access management, federation and Web services security”, Speaker: Daniel Raskin, Chief Identity Strategist – Sun Microsystems

1:05 - 1:30pm "Privileged Identity Risk Management: Mitigating the Insider Threat", Speaker: Richard Weeks, VP of Channels and Business Development, Cyber-Ark

1:35 - 2:00pm "The WHO behind the WHAT: Arcot Authentication and Sun OpenSSO Enterprise "  Speaker: R 'Doc' Vaidhyanathan, Chief Product Officer - Arcot

Sun Booth:

12:00 - 2:00pm Nick Wooler, showcasing DSEE

12:00 - 2:00pm Neil Ghandi, showcasing Role Manager

This weekend the Directory Community said goodbye to a true hero, Don Bowen.  Many on the Directory Team at Sun had the pleasure of working with Don and will miss his energy and enthusiasm for life, technology and his family.  Our condolences go out to his family.  We will miss you Don!

 You can read more or leave a comment for his family here!  

Yesterday, Neil Ghandi, Matt Hamlin, Etienne Remillon and Nick Wooler gave a quick overview of what is new in Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7 and Role Manager 5.  Here are just a few of the great highlights that were discussed during the presentation.  Of course, you can get the full video embeded below.  Lastly, if you are interested in seeing more events like this you can go to the webinar site here.  

You can download the slides here.  You can download the video here.

Sun Learning Services will be holding a beta class for Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (Directory Server EE) 7.0 Administration training in San Francisco, CA, from Tuesday, December 1 through Friday, December 4, 2009. Tuition is waived and there will be no charge for your valued partnership in this review. However, participants are responsible for travel expenses, lodging and incidentals.

This course provides students with the opportunity to learn to perform routine maintenance and troubleshooting techniques, monitor and tune servers, create and manage multiple databases, and perform other tasks encountered in day-to-day operations of Directory Server EE 7.0.

Labs acquaint students with the tools included with Directory Server EE. Students should use them to perform tasks such as searching and modifying directory data, exporting and importing data, starting and stopping servers, and troubleshooting. Students should also migrate server versions, create multiple databases, configure servers for replication, and tune
performance.

This course focuses on maintenance and operations issues related to Directory Server EE rather than planning and design issues. For planning and design topics, refer to DIR-2217: Sun Java(TM) System Directory Server Enterprise Edition: Analysis and Planning. If you are already extremely familiar with Directory Server EE, this course probably covers topics you are already familiar with.

We are looking for attendees who will provide a lot of feedback about the class and how we can improve it. We want students who will ask a lot of difficult and annoying questions that we can't answer, do the labs and make them break, and beat up on the product.

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY: If you have specific in-depth needs, such as heavy-duty performance tuning or analysis, planning, and architecture, please be advised that this class will NOT meet those needs. If you are new or somewhat new to the product, and need to know how to install and administer the product, use the command-line interface and Directory Server Control Center console, use the logs, and know a little about directory proxy server, this class will be will be an ideal introduction.

PLEASE NOTE: We require a passing level of familiarity with LDAP concepts, such as DN, DIT, RDN, search filter, and base DN. We will not have time to cover basic LDAP concepts during this beta course. You also need to know how to use the Solaris OS (or Linux) command line.

Our classroom space in San Francisco is extremely limited and we will very likely be unable to accommodate all who are interested. Apologies in advance if we cannot accept your enrollment.

If you're interested in attending, please contact David Goldsmith (David.Goldsmith@sun.com) for more information.

Sun's Identity Team have been busy over the summer!  On Oct. 9, 2009 the Identity Management Team announced the release of Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7 and Role Manager 5.  Next Wednesday, Oct. 21 at 8:00am PT, Neil Ghandi (Role Manager Technical Product Manager) and Nick Wooler (Product Line Manager, Directory Services) will be giving an overview of some of the great features that exist in the new releases.  Here are a couple of highlights:

What's New with Directory Server EE 7.0

• Boosts speed and performance: DSEE 7.0 has been optimized to improve performance of some operations by more than 3x the current version. In addition, this release provides hardware optimization with up to 60% improvement in authentications and modifications. 
• Reduces Total Cost of Ownership– Reduce cost by using the only solution in the market that provides customers with a directory server, virtual directory, proxy server, web console and Active Directory synchronization tool-kit under a single license.
• Hassle Free Upgrade – DSEE 7.0 provides a simple upgrade path and provides 5x performance improvement in data import times, thereby reducing migration costs.

What's New with Role Manager 5.0

• 360 Degree View of Assigned Access – A unified view of data related to user access that empowers reviewers to make more         intelligent decisions concerning users access.
• Closed-loop Remediation – A complete end-to-end solution for reviewing user access and removing inappropriately assigned access.
• Rule Life-cycle Management – The first solution for managing the complete life-cycle of role assignment and SoD audit rules.

Interested in hearing more? Interested in hearing more about the release and what business problems it solves for your enterprise?  Register here for the Webinar here:

Topic:	Improve Compliance, Access Controls, and Performance with Sun's Latest Releases of Role Manager and DSEE
Date:	Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Time:	10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT / 19.00 CET (check my timezone)
Duration:	1 hour
Speaker:	Sun Product Managers: Neil Gandhi and Nick Wooler
Registration::	Register Here

Our very own, Ludo Poitou will be presenting with other luminaries in the identity industry at The 2nd.International conference on LDAP, LDAPCon 2009 will be held on September 20th and 21st at Waterfront Marriot Hotel , Portland OR, USA.

LDAP is gaining renewed attention as the identity repository for enterprise, telco's, global partner networks, healthcare and education institutions.  The LDAP repositories have been faced with massive growth over the last five years and the performance and availability they have come to rely upon is being tested. New requirements driven by the growth of users, the explosion of security requirements imposing more "writes" and the access to web services security and policies are forcing LDAP experts to look at new innovations.

You should attend, if you want to be apart of hearing how LDAP experts are innovating and addressing these business and technical challenges.  If you haven't registered yet, please register NOW here!

The registration fee includes access to the LinuxCon 2009 (Sep 21 - 23), and if you still need to be convinced that it's worth attending, you can check the agenda here.

Sun OpenDS SE 2.0 is a high-performance, highly-extensible, pure Java directory server that delivers a fully compliant LDAPv3 server that passes all of the compliance, interoperability and security tests suites. Furthermore, Sun OpenDS SE 2.0 implements most of the standard and experimental LDAP extensions defined in the IETF as RFCs or Internet-Drafts, ensuring maximum interoperability with LDAP client applications.

With a limited footprint allowing the server to be embedded in other Java applications, OpenDS has a very rich set of APIs making it easy to extend and increase usage scope.

Sun OpenDS SE 2.0 also supports a multi-master replication model with optional assured replication that guarantees the high availability of the data for all operations, searches or updates. While theoretically unlimited with regards to the number of masters, the Sun OpenDS SE 2.0 server has been stressed under heavy and durable load with 8 Masters.

This 2.0 version significantly increases performance both in read and write, making it one of the most efficient commercial directory servers available.

Sun OpenDS SE 2.0 is based on the open source community project OpenDS that is constructing next generation directory service software. The initial effort is led by Sun and the primary contributions are by Sun employees, but the goal is to attract developers and other interested parties from around the world. Sun OpenDS SE is the Sun commercial offering based on this project.  

You can find out more information about Sun OpenDS SE 2.0 commercial release at:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/sunopends

Identity management in government is a very important topic as it crosses a number of domains.  There are a number of issues as government's across the world pursue e-Government initiatives.  Norway is a great example as they have launched a portal to allow citizens to opt into services that they wish to consume from the government (e.g. postal, doctor, etc.).  The government portal in Norway uses OpenSSO.  This is only one of the ways in which Sun is helping governments further information sharing and reduce the cost of providing citizens and organizations the services they need to be successful.

If you are interested in hearing more about the different way's Sun can help governments help solve Identity Management issues such as the following, please attend the following webinar.

• Secure control over information access by dynamic and diverse user populations
• Single sign-on and identity federation for seamless operations across multiple IT environments
• Automated provisioning and deprovisioning to reduce costs
• Delegrated and self-service account management to improve the user experience
• Auditing and reporting to meet internal security and compliance requirements
  

Event:  Identity Management for Government
Date:   Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Time:   10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT / 19.00 CET
Reserve Your Seat Today!

At this very moment, every company on the planet is trying to find ways to reduce cost.  A creative and innovative member of the Directory Server team at Sun has come up with a way to do just that using the iPhone and LDAP.  Ludo's blog post located here, provides a great overview of the technical detail (what tools, platform, etc.) so please read it for more detail on how Anton put this solution together.  Let's focus on the business angle of this important innovation using LDAP.  Again, we hope David Kearns is reading because this is really what "Pimping Your Directory" is all about.

More and more companies are having to support mobile workforces or employees that work a portion of their time at home.  Sun has been one of the leaders in this space.  Not only does it improve productivity but it gives knowledgeworkers more empowerment thus improving their quality of work and life and thus loyalty to the company that employs them.  However, the tools that support these workers have been slow to catch-up.  Company Directories are a good example.  How many times do employees call the 1-800 number to get an employee number to make a phone call on the road?  As a consultant, I used to do this all the time.  As a Sun employee, I have used this feature more than once while traveling to different trade shows, between offices, etc.  This ties up valuable resources who could be routing real customer calls! I have realized this paradox but when you have to get something done you go through the path of least resistance.  And, let's face it voice portals have not replaced human beings in either efficiency or effectiveness.

Here is where the innovator at Sun, Anton Bobrov, filled the gap. The Sun IT and Directory Teams recognized this gap a long time ago and placed a limited version of the employee directory outside the firewall.  It is a great tool if you have a web browser and don't want to VPN into the network.  However, Anton realized there was a better solution via the iPhone.  He has developed an iPhone App that is an LDAP browser that allows employees to connect to this Directory outside the firewall and quickly search, find an employee and make the phone call from one device.  My vote for iPhone App of the Year would be for the LDAP app by Zen and our very own Anton Bobrov. 

The Business Case

So hypothetically, using Company A with 33,000 employees as an example, imagine 5% of employees have an iPhone.  Imagine that same 5% make one phone call a week or 52 calls per year to the 1-800 number to get a phone call.  Imagine each call takes 2 min of productivity away from the call center employee then this simple application could save approximately 2,860 hours.  Put another way this is 1.43 FTE per year worth of productivity.

Number of Employees	33,000 Employees
Percent that have iPhone	5% Employees
Number of Employees with iPhone	1,650 Employees
Number of calls made per year to 1-800 per week by one employee	52 calls per year per employee
Total number of calls made in a year	85,800 calls per year
Total number of hours taken (avg time per search 2 min)	2,860 hours
Number of Employees Needed to Cover this Task (50 weeks * 40 hours)	1.43 FTE's

Please see Ludo's blog for more detail on how the app works and what Anton did to build it.  His bog is located here.

How do you get it?

Go to the App Store and seach "LDAP".  You want to download the Zen version for $3.99.  Refer to the cost savings table above if you balk at the price.  Here are the configuration details for Sun's directory, as described in Ludo's blog here.

Here's the settings that I've used (once you've installed the Directory application, there is a "Directory" section in the Settings application).

Identity: cn=John Smith (12345),ou=people,dc=sun,dc=com
[your Sun ID should be enclosed in brackets and watch the spaces]
Password: My Sun password
LDAP: book.sun.com
(Keep the remaining untouched).

How do I get one for my company?

If you are employee at a company that has a large mobile workforce you should show this blog post to an IT Director, Call Center Director, or someone who can make this project happen.  This is a quick win for most companies in improving productivity.  You can use DSEE or OpenDS with replication to create the directory instance outside the firewall.  Publish a configuration guide for employees and start improving productivity.

Benoit Chaffanjon did an interesting "Benchmarketing" (you have to read his blog to understand why he calls it that) that showed Directory Server Enterprise Edition may be able to support 450,000 + LDAP operations per second.   The benchmarketing was done on a Sun Blade 6000 using the Intel Xeon x5560 on OpenSolaris.  All the gory details can be read in Benoit's blog here.  This is mind-blowing when you consider the cost of transaction per second and also what this might look like on an SSD.  We are doing some further testing as Mark Craig mentions in his blog not only to validate these amazing results but also to confirm the performance using OpenSSO and on a SSD.

You can Try It by clicking button below:

Here is one table taken from Benoit's blog

Modify Operations Performed  

Count	Avg/Second	Avg/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
4806293	4179.383	20896.913	55.65	-0.061

Modify Time (ms)  

Total Duration	Total Count	Avg Duration	Avg Count/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
29812733	480600	6.203	20895.652	0.19	-0.068

Search Operations Performed  

Count	Avg/Second	Avg/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
38452462	33436.922	167184.609	447.43	-0.061

Initial Search Time (ms)  

Total Duration	Total Count	Avg Duration	Avg Count/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
5000859	4807211	10.403	20900.913	0.375	0.015

Subsequent Search Time (ms)  

Total Duration	Total Count	Avg Duration	Avg Count/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
146366814	33643572	4.351	146276.391	0.189	0.171

You can Try and Buy one of these machines today. 

The team is back from our successful trip to the European Identity Conference.  Ludo and Mark Craig did a great job on the Identity Bus and Virtual Directory panels.  We will have more about this later in the week.  

We wanted to pass along a quick note about an upcomming webinar on Directory Services which will be held May 20.  The webinar will cover how to reduce cost and improve the speed and performance of your enterprise using directory services.  The conversation will go over the following:

• How to use save cost by consolidating identity sprawl in your enterprise
  
• How to meet agressive time-lines on a merger and acquisition
  
• How to federate faster with virtual directories

If you are interested, please sign-up here.  Even if you are not able to attend, registering will give you access to the replay.

Oh, and that is not Craig MacDonald in the picture to the right.  We got this from a very talented photographer in the Creative Commons here.

Ludo Poitou and Mark Craig from Sun Microsystems will be a part of two illustrious panels at the European Identity Conference today.  Ludo will be a part of the panel talking about the Identity Bus which is a topic that Felix Gaethens, Kim Cameron, and David Kearns talked about last year.  The discussion should be interesting becasue Sun has some of the products necessary to create the "identity bus" today through OpenDS, DSEE, Virtual Directory, OpenSSO, Identity Manager Connectors, and Netbeans,  You don't need all of these to create the bus but a standards based way of storiing and accessing identities and then leveraging them via other applications or into the cloud are all possible using the tools at Sun.

Mark Craig will be joining Oracle, Radiant Logic and Symlabs in talking about Virtual Directories and their importance to Directory Services.  Sun includes it's virtual directory features as a part of it's core product and license so all customers who use DSEE 6.3 today have a virtual directory already as a part of their license.  Mark will be explaining how customers are using Virtual Directory to do data center consolidation, simplify mergers and acquisitions, and federate faster using Sun's Virtual Directory.