Discovering Identity: VRM Demands Customer Response

Mark Dixon's quest to explore the world of Identity Management

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VRM Demands Customer Response Friday - January 5, 2007

My post about VRM elicited an interesting response that demonstrates how vendors must respond quickly to customers in this new "Customer Centric" paradigm. James McGovern challenged, "OK, if customers should manage vendors, what should this customer be doing to get the folks at Sun to start not just embracing open standards but to implement them in their products. This customer would like to see Sun do something with OpenID and XACML." We at Sun like this kind of input from customers. So, I immediately forewarded James' request to our director of Identity product management, who responded, "Always good to hear from the customer. So what does he want us to do with OpenID and XACML? Does he have real use cases that he thinks would be solved by us embracing these standards?" James, the ball is in your court. Could you please share with us the use cases where you want to leverage those standards? Isn't this Participation Age interchange great? Technorati Tags: Identity, Digital Identity, Identity Management, VRM, OpenID, XACML


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	11:33 AM MST

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Comments:

Didn't Pat Patterson demonstrate Sun Access Manager integration with OpenID at the last IIW conference?

I'm pretty sure I saw it...

Posted by Pamela on January 05, 2007 at 01:22 PM MST #

Ah, Pamela, I fooled you with the smoke and mirrors ;-)

What I actually showed was OpenID-style identifier resolution to find a SAML identity provider. The demonstration is online here - you can follow through the steps of resolving the user's URL through YADIS to the location of SAML metadata.

Posted by Pat on January 05, 2007 at 04:38 PM MST #

Why you sneak you :)

Of course, your entire demo did run over open standards -- so it seems to me that it is still well worth mentioning.

Phew, good thing James cared enough to ask about these issues - otherwise I would have been forevermore flawed in my understanding. Besides, it just can't be a bad thing that vendors are being asked to show that they are working on this kind of stuff. It's a good conversation to have.

Cheers,

Pam

Posted by Pamela on January 05, 2007 at 10:22 PM MST #

Pamela, I see that the response conveniently skipped the discussion around XACML. While Sun came out with a reference implementation, they need to consider embedding XACML support into their identity management suite. Pat, I have shared several documents last year with you on how we would use SAML and XACML together and you responded back, so I know they were received. Now for the hard part, you get to do some internal evangelizing as to taking the documents I shared and figuring out how they could be 100% implemented on Sun technology. Minimally you will share with Don since I don't think he was on the original list. Don, integration is not implementation. Implementation means that Sun offers a product that implements the OpenID and XACML specifications not just integrate with others. Lets keep the dialog honest...

Posted by James on January 06, 2007 at 10:35 AM MST #

James: you seem to be something of a conspiracy theorist. I know nothing *about* XACML - so I did not speak of it. I have no interest in pulling the wool over your eyes, I'm as interested as you are in seeing these technologies integrated into real world products. Besides - I have no wool to pull; I speak only for myself - my thoughts, my opinions. I saw something demonstrated recently that in my perception showed that work was being done to integrate open standards into mainstream Sun products in the area of access management. If that wasn't what you wanted to hear, please feel free to disregard it.

Pamela

Posted by Pamela on January 06, 2007 at 03:33 PM MST #