SUN's Identity Management info Identity Fever

This week, I attended the introductory bootcamp on Sun's newest portal initiative : Portal Websynergy.

It dealth with the evolutionary process of the joined partnership between Liferay and Sun, in particular the way Sun is injecting Sun Java System Portal Server capabilities into the current Liferay Portal, an open-sourced merger known as a separate portal product currently called "Project WebSynergy".

See: https://portal.dev.java.net/ and http://blogs.sun.com/portal/

What was interesting to see is that the new WebSynergy portal is no longer tightly connected to the Sun Java System Access Manager (or Federated Access Manager as known starting with released 8.0), but now is connected with OpenSSO/FAM 8.0 for pure authentication and identity attribute delivery purposes only.

The connection with OpenSSO is configured via the admin widgets in WebSynergy :
You specify 4 parameters : Login URL (towards OpenSSO incl.goto parameter), LogOut URL, Service URL (using the new OpenSSO REST  identity webservice to obtain identity information), and the CookieName.
This means it does not need the OpenSSO Api nor does it need a Policy Agent installed.

Info on the OpenSSO REST webservice:
http://developers.sun.com/identity/reference/techart/id-svcs.html

WebSynergy also allows local authentication via internal user repositories (filesystem, RDBMS, ...) , onboard LDAP synchronisation with that local store etc.

Also keep in mind that, even though WebSynergy is a perfect fit for Developer/Web2.0 oriented start-ups (and adds additional functionality on top of the classic LifeRay Portal), the enterprise features as currently known in Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 will be added in a high pace to this new portal platform.
The same is true for it's authorisation/authentication capabilities and Identity Based Content Delivery functionality.

I'm looking forward to see how Identity Manager could be coupled with this environment, allowing it to provision profile data into the local WebSynergy portal, whilst provisioning an account into the LDAP/OpenSSO repository for authentication