Wednesday May 07, 2008
Daniel Raskin, Pat Patterson and I gave a presentation on Monday at CommunityOne to a good sized crowd on how to use OpenSSO as Access and Federation infrastructure for enterprise mash-ups. Pat did a great job of pulling off a demonstration of how to federate with Google Aps, Salesforce.com within an enterprise portal framework despite the different protocols that both SAAS providers use to manage authentication and authorization. The session was well attended and it was great to see some familiar faces as well such as Chris Kampmeir, Joe DiPol and Martin Knutson.
Marina Sum did a nice job of writing an article summarizing the presentation here.
Wednesday May 07, 2008
Daniel Raskin, Pat Patterson and I gave a presentation on Monday at CommunityOne to a good sized crowd on how to use OpenSSO as Access and Federation infrastructure for enterprise mash-ups. Pat did a great job of pulling off a demonstration of how to federate with Google Aps, Salesforce.com within an enterprise portal framework despite the different protocols that both SAAS providers use to manage authentication and authorization. The session was well attended and it was great to see some familiar faces as well such as Chris Kampmeir, Joe DiPol and Martin Knutson.
Marina Sum did a nice job of writing an article summarizing the presentation here.
Thursday Apr 03, 2008
Jonathon was named to the top 15 Open Source leaders list produced by eweek this week. You can read the article and see the illustrious company that he keeps these days here. The MySQL acquisition has been a big part of reminding people that Sun is a leader in the open source software movement. After working on the first release of xVM Ops Center I have moved over to the Identity Management group at Sun and I am working as a Product Manager on Access Manager and Federation Manager. One of the aspects of the job that really was exciting when I joined the team is that they do all of their development in the open via OpenSSO. This makes things so much easier when discussing features and roadmaps with customers. We can point to the project and say "go and try it". We have had a number of companies contact us recently and as we have the discussion about when do you want to start the POC they respond with "we have already downloaded and evaluated the software. How do we get support?".
By the way, if you haven't seen Daniel's blog recently then you should check it out. The FedLet is coming and it sounds like it is going to revolutionize the way people think about access and federation management.
Lastly, I am a space geek and I came across another blogger at Sun who has some great pictures of the recent Discovery Shuttle processing and launch. Thanks Dan for putting these up for people to see. I am probably going to go and see a missile launch at Vandenberg with my son in May. If anyone knows the best spot to see the launch from please let me know?
Wednesday Mar 26, 2008
Wednesday Mar 19, 2008
Jim Carr from Security Magazine published an interesting article this week that exposes the long road that we still have to travel in the industry managing patient information within hospitals/organizations/enterprises. You can read the whole story here. The article doesn't go into tremendous detail about how the employees got access to the information. However, it does illustrate the challenge Health Care providers have in balancing access to patient information to people "who need to know" while maintaining patient information privacy. This is further exacerbated by the changing roles and responsibilities in organizations and applications. Ben Worthen, from the Wall Street Journal created a blog post here that also reminds us of the fact that a number of security breaches occur from trusted employees.
"But lest you think the threat is more imagined than real, consider that
among companies that experienced a data breach in 2006, 23% said the
culprit was an insider, according to a survey by the Computing
Technology Industry Alliance. "
Additionally, towards the end of the article an argument is made to sanction Doctor's who may have checked Britney's information without having a direct need to see the data.
Tuesday Mar 18, 2008
Jamie Nelson, the director of engineering for Federation Access Manager, provides some very valuable insights into building identity security into your applications from the ground-up. Jamie also shares his insights into the problems that customers face in federating with partners and suppliers.
Check out the full article here
Tuesday Mar 11, 2008
This is just a quick blog to illustrate how Java is helping us space enthusiasts track what is going on in space. Here is a great group of websites that you can use to monitor real-time data about the shuttle mission and spaceflight in general. If you look closely you will find this website that uses a Java applet to track the position of the ISS and Shuttle over earth. However, if you are interested in trying to see the shuttle pass over your home or office location, you can find your location via another Java applet at this NASA website and it will calculate the time and direction you should look. Additionally, it will also present certain solar variables that might impact your ability to see.
Friday Mar 07, 2008
I follow a couple of blogs at Sun and Mark Dixon is one of the people that I get to read from time-to-time. Today he has a blog entry that is fantastic. I, like Mark, wanted to be an Astronaut. I can remember reading about the Shuttle before it was launched on it's first mission and building a clay model in fourth grade to share my enthusiasm with my classmates. One of the great honors in my life was meeting an Astronaut in person on the sidelines of one of my kids soccer games (you never know who you are going to meet at a soccer game).
These pictures are inspirational and I can't wait to share them with my kids tonight. Thanks Mark for sharing with all of us.
Take a look at all of the pictures here:
Here are some of my other favorite NASA and space related sites:
Mars Rover click here
Go see a launch of a real rocket in California at Vandenberg Air Force Base. You can get information about these events or how to take a tour of the base and operations here
Thursday Mar 06, 2008
Last week you may have heard that Sun finalized the acquisition of MySQL which is a great day for Sun, MySQL and OpenSource. There are three reasons why this is a great move for Sun. One, we add another great Open Source brand to Sun's great portfolio of software products (JAVA, Solaris, MySQL, Glassfish, FAM, xVM, etc.). Two, we add a great database to our portfolio and ultimately broaden the choice for our customers. Third, we give developers even more reason to use Sun as their infrastructure of choice for the innovative applications they are building for customers today.
Most of all you got to love the 15 minute rule. In this video Marten Mickos refers to the 15 minute rule at MySQL which refers to their rule that customers should be able to download, install and start using within 15 minutes. This is a model built for developers that live on the web whether at work or in their every day life.
I work on the Federated Access Management team software team and we believe that the user experience of enterprise software is critical to customer's success. Customer's need to be able to download, install, configure and deploy software quickly so that they can get to value quickly. This is in the core of our DNA and it is what we believe will help differentiate our product line in the future. Another example of how the MySQL acquisition is about marrying companies with similar DNA and cultures. Go to OpenSSO and you can start to see some of the workflows and user experience improvements that we have put into the product. We will have to run a test and see if this marketing guy can perform against the 15 minute rule.
Wednesday Mar 05, 2008
Kim Cameron provided a link recently to a great article by the Economist. The Economist in February reviewed how government;s were creating portals and using identity based software to aggregate services for citizens. You can get the article here. This is a trend that is happening not only in Europe (here is a great case study on Norway.no which used Federated Access Management to deliver SSO across all the government service providers while giving citizens choice) but also in the United States as governments try to provide more efficient services to an increasing online electorate. This has some great benefits, here are a couple to name a few: better information for health care providers, reduced cost and more eco-friendly government by reducing paper distributed information for citizens, reduce cost by getting better identity information on citizens (e.g. wrong address information results in government communication and postage costs to deliver mail to wrong location). However, despite many other benefits the fact that the government is holding more and more information about citizens causes some citizens to grow concerned. This article provides some insights into those issues but also on how much more work still needs to be done to leverage and protect identity for customers and governments.
Nice work by the Economist. Read the article here
Tuesday Mar 04, 2008
The FTC Released information about trends in consumer fraud for 2007. Identity Theft leads the category for the eighth year in a row.
[Read More]
Friday Jan 25, 2008
This week has been a lot of fun. I spent the week in Las Vegas with a gre
at team of Sales Engineers, Software Engineers from Federation Access Manager and our product marketing team. The goal of the event was to create three customer focused demo's to illustrate how Federation Access Manager can be used by our customers. I recently moved from the xVM Ops Center team to the Access Manager product marketing team so this was my first opportunity to meet the extended team. What a talented team.
Terry did a great job of preparing the team for the event by holding several meetings prior to arriving in Las Vegas. The team worked on developing high-level use cases. Once in Vegas the team gelled quickly getting to work using agile processes and programming methods to get something tangible to demo via the first day. I have attended other events with similar objectives and they have not been as productive. What was really impressive was the hand on nature and knowledge sharing that occurred between the three critical constituencies. The team did blow off some steam at ESPN Zone and Jay-z's new club 40/40. Everyone left thinking "I wish I could have one of those screens for my superbowl party".
As Pat Patterson pointed out in his blog earlier in the week here, a number of the team already blog so you can get access to the latest mindshare of the team.
Lastly, if you are interested in hearing an interesting review of Ping Identity Daniel Raskin was able to put together a great podcast with Ping himself.
Monday Dec 17, 2007
This was too funny to pass along. Having worked in the education space I know that System Administrators don't like it when different applications are installed on machines which they have to manage. But, surely someone has lost their perspective or view on what they should be managing in the classroom.
Read the entire story here
btw....the language in the story could be cleaned-up but overall funny story.
Monday Dec 10, 2007
OpenxVM launched it's first open source project today! It is the first of a number of projects that the team at Sun will be launching to build a community around virtualization. There are a number of existing projects already, most notably the work done by Open Solaris and the works derived from the Xen community here or the work done on LDOMS in Open Solaris here. This is the first project in the community geared towards the management of the physical and virtual assets.
The project is Sun's first project under GPL v3 and a number of roles are available for members who want to participate. The project offers several pre-built binaries that will support work on Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC and Linux x86 platforms.
We have too many agents consuming resources on servers today. What if
we could minimize the number and have one that provided all of the
information or functionality we needed to manage physical and virtual
assets.
Take action:
- Get more information on the project here
- Get involved here
A number of influential people are talking about ideas of things to come. You should add these to your favorite reader and monitor our progress.
More information to come on the Common Agent Container.
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