Scott Fehrman's journal on life as a Principal Engineer (PE) @ Sun. Systems Engineering 101

Last week I got an email from a developer that is using Project OpenPTK. They want to use HTTPS/SSL to secure communications between the Sun Identity Manager and an OpenPTK-enabled application.

I was pretty sure this was "do-able" but I have not had a chance/need to configure OpenPTK using HTTPS/SSL. With that said, I did some research, contacted some co-workers, and set-up a little test lab. The process is relatively straight forward, I used two Glassfish domains (SPML-Server / SPML-Client) and self-signed certificates:

1. Configure OpenPTK applications to use SSL/HTTPS
2. Replace the default certificate on the SPML-Server (Sun Identity Manager)
3. Add the certificate to the SPML-Client (OpenPTK-enabled Application)

The complete (detailed) process is documented in the Project OpenPTK Release 1.1 Installation Guide

This past Thursday evening we had our third meeting. Sun hosted the meeting in their Itasca, IL office. The attendees included the local Sun Identity team, partners (Laurus Technologies) and users (United Airlines, Motorola, Kraft Foods, Northeastern Illinois University).

To "kick-off" the meeting, the Sun Identity team asked the User Group community for help ... Leveraging the wikis.sun.com site, they started a new collaboration site focused at sharing Identity Manager knowledge. http://wikis.sun.com/display/sunidmdev is a wiki site where registered users can share their workflows, forms, and other artifacts with the community.

Agenda:

6:00 - 6:30	Greetings and Catered Dinner
6:30 - 6:45	Introductions
6:45 - 7:30	What's New with Identity Manager and Role Manager
7:30 - 7:45	Break
7:45 - 8:30	Integrating Identity Manager and Access Manager (OpenSSO)
8:30 - 9:00	User Group business

The first presentation was given by the Identity folks at Sun. They gave an overview of Identity Manager 8.0 and Role Manager 4.0. They covered the new features, integration points and a roadmap. The second presentation was given by Laurus Technologies. They gave a presentation and demonstration related to how you can integrate Identity Manager with Access Manager (they actually used OpenSSO, very cool).

During the "business" part of the meeting, we talked about how to improve the User Group. Here is what the members asked for:

• Want to hear customer stories
• Have meetings during business hours
• Allow remote attendance (webex)

We updated out list of future meeting topics. We had two customers offer to give a presentation on what they are doing with Identity Manager. The next meeting has been set for Thursday November 13th, 2008. It will be a breakfast meeting held at the Sun Itasca IL office, a webex session will be available those users that can't attend in-person. The current agenda (subject to change):

8:30 - 9:00	Greetings and Breakfast
9:00 - 9:45	Customer Story: Motorola
9:45 - 10:30	Customer Story: To Be Confirmed
10:30 - 11:00	User Group business

Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Two Pierce Place
15th Floor, Skyline Conference Room
Itasca, IL 60143

Future topics:

1. Sun Role Manager SOD and Compliance
2. Sun Identity Manager and and Access Manager integration
3. Directory Server non-people use
4. Federated Access Manger 8 feature update
5. Sun JavaCaps 6 feature update
6. Password Sync with Active Directory
7. Identity Manager to enable business growth
8. PKI integration
9. Customer Stories
10. Panel of Customers for Role Manager
11. Identity as a software service (SaaS)
12. ESSO
13. External facing deployments
14. Role Rationalizaton: best practices, customer deployments

If you wish to be imformed (sent emails) of User Group activities, please send an email to RequestChicagoIdmLUG at Sun dot COM and you will be added to the mailing list.

Looking for a wiki to collaborate information ... i've got just the one: wikis.sun.com

Project OpenPTK is about to release a new version (1.1). As with any software development project, the jobs not done until the documentation is done. Previous releases used PDF files to distribute documentation (source files were .odt). Emailing source files between the development team was not working. We decided to move our documentation to a wiki. Our requirements:

• Fully accessible to anyone for reading
• Easy to manage document / page structures
• Ability to control create / update access to specific documents / pages
• Easy to use syntax
• Scalable / Available architecture

After researching a number of options, we decided to create a project on http://wikis.sun.com. Our wiki site can be directly found at http://wikis.sun.com/display/openptk or from the OpenPTK url http://wiki.openptk.org

The site is still under construction by the Project Team. The migration of documents to wiki pages has been going great. A couple of pages are done ... take a look at the Overview, Release Notes, and the Configuration Reference Guide.

If your looking for a public facing wiki site to host your collaboration project ... check it out.