DSEE 7.0 is available for download today here with new documentation here. The critical document you want to look at is the upgrade and migration guide here.
Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 Boosts Speed and Performance:
Considered one of the best extranet LDAP Directory Servers in the market today, the latest version of Directory Server Enterprise Edition allows enterprises to accelerate growth in a simplified way, improve performance and lower total cost of ownership. Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 has been optimized to improve performance by more than three times when compared to its predecessor. In addition, this release provides innovations that improve authentication and modification performance by 60 percent, allowing customers to accelerate their applications without changing one line of code.
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.
You can see a webinar we did recently on DSEE 7 and Role Manager 5 on why this release is important to your business and how this can help your company meet growth goals and reduce your total cost of ownership.
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
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.
This week Google launched a new service called Google Dashboard which can be found in the account settings in top right hand corner under "personal settings". The service is a great idea for a couple of reasons. One, it served as a reminder (at least to this user) of all the services that I had actually signed-up for from Google over the years. Which given the pace of their innovation and continuous beta approach and my propensity to try new things in the technology space was quite a few. The second reason and arguably the most important was that it offered you the link to go and manage your privacy settings from the dashboard to the services you have subscribed. This is critical and important for those customers and users that are interested in actively managing their identity at Google. Here are the reasons why!
In the world of Web 2.0, Mashups and Federation business's are constantly stitching together different applications to provide value to customer's and consumer's. Organization's need to give user's control of their privacy setting's to allow them to control what information they share when and where on the internet. Most user's don't mind providing the information or more likely are unaware of what they are sharing. This is why the Google Dashboard feature is a powerful tool for user's to improve their security. The ability to access these privacy setting's existed in each of the services that Google offered. However, as I mentioned above, I had forgotten about all the different services I had signed up for within Google Land. This consolidation in one spot, gave me information, power and most importantly choice in one spot making my ability to make better decisions about how my identity is managed on the internet.
Facebook has learned this lesson and has done a lot to put the power in user's hands of controlling how applications user their information. I applaud what they have done to provide not only the tools but the education to users about what that privacy information actually means. You can join the Facebook Security Fan Page to get updates on different steps they are taking to improve the choices users have to manage their identity data. Another great step they have taken is also in the user experience they provide users in the pages that manage services and privacy by providing contextual help for users. Big improvements that contribute to better user decision making.
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 using 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
12:30 - 2:30pm Mat Hamlin showcasing Identity
Manager
Tuesday, Nov 10th
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
Tired of managing agents in your infrastructure? OpenSSO provides a great way to reduce the number of agents that you have to manage in your application infrastructure. Aravindan Ranganathan, a Technical Architect on the Sun team, wrote a great article on how to use the Identity Services that are available in OpenSSO to include security in your applications. This article focuses on Single-Sign-On and Sign-Out but this the fourth in the series focused on Identity Services. You can look at the other articles here:
Identity Services are important in a number of ways for customers looking for a Web Access Management solution. They not only allow you to build security into applications or reduce the number of agents they have to manage. The identity services also allow customers an architecture for better integration into their application architecture giving them ultimately more choice. When you create enterprise software you have to design for a number of different environments. The ability to access these services gives customers the maximum amount of choice and a choice leads to lower costs and higher value.
Lastly, I wanted to thank Marina Sum and her team for these great articles on OpenSSO. The content and technical detail are valuable to the community.
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.
This week has been a lot of fun. I spent the week in Las Vegas with a great 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.
DSEE 7.0 is available for download today here with new documentation here. The critical document you want to look at is the upgrade and migration guide here.
|
|
|
|
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.
This week Google launched a new service called 
information. I applaud what they have done to provide not only the tools but the education to users about what that privacy information actually means. You can join the 
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 
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.
