Superpatterns

Pat Patterson on Identity Management, Federation and Single Malt Scotch

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15 Sep · Tue 2009

Easier Microsoft Active Directory Connectivity in OpenSSO Express 8
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It's nice to see your RFE's implemented, and that's exactly what happened with OpenSSO issue # 4053: Active Directory configuration should use AD domain name rather than LDAP host/port. I saw Kohsuke's blog entry on More Active Directory integration in Java a little while ago and realized that we could take exactly the same approach in OpenSSO - prompt the admin for the Active Directory domain name rather than a host name and port number.

As Kohsuke mentions, this has a number of advantages - every AD admin knows the domain name, while many would likely have to go look up an individual host name, not to mention the LDAP port number. Since we use the domain name to look up an individual AD controller via DNS, it also means that the admin doesn't need to update OpenSSO's configuration as AD controllers come and go - OpenSSO will always get a valid host name from DNS.

So, when configuring OpenSSO Express 8, you can now just specify the AD domain name. As improvements go, this one is pretty small, but, as I think everyone agrees, the cumulative effect of all these little improvements in OpenSSO over the past two or three years has been HUGE...

@ 02:06 PM PDT Comments [2]

13 Mar · Fri 2009

OpenSSO Tab Sweep - Mar 13 2009
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Lots of news over the last couple of weeks from the world of OpenSSO. Events in New York, new Fedlet innovations and more; read on...

The first OpenSSO Community Day fast approaches - next Tuesday, March 17 2009 at the NYU Kimmel Center in Greenwich Village, New York City. We're fully booked now, but there are still some folks on the 'maybe' list, so you can sign up on the waiting list and bag a place if one of those maybes turns into a 'no'.
Late-breaking news for next week - I'll be joining Java evangelist Sang Shin for his Community One East session "OpenSSO: Enterprise Security". We'll be presenting in Breakout Room 4 at 10:10am on Wednesday, March 18 2009.
One I mentioned over at The Aquarium last week - we've posted the OpenSSO release schedule for the next year. There's lots of detail on the features planned for the next few express builds of OpenSSO, as well as OpenSSO Enterprise 8.1, scheduled for March 2010.
Giuseppe Gennaro, a recent hire into the OpenSSO engineering team, has blogged about the long-awaited .Net version of our Fedlet. Like its Java cousin, the .Net Fedlet will easily federation-enable .Net applications via SAML 2.0. If you're working with federation in .Net-land, keep an eye on Giuseppe!
Super Sun SE Jeff Bounds doesn't blog often, but when he does, it's all goodness. His most recent entry is OpenSSO Authentication with Active Directory (Part 1), expanding on the OpenSSO documentation to provide a step-by-step tutorial for using OpenSSO with AD, chock-full of screenshots. More great stuff for the Microsoft-oriented.
Hot on the heels of my recent entry pointing out the interaction between SAML and XACML, Steven Jarosz, another star Sun SE, has started to document some interesting ways of deploying the Fedlet, the first being a XACML policy enforcement point (PDP). People sometime ask me "How does open source make a difference in identity at Sun?" - this is a perfect example - these innovative applications would be an order of magnitude more difficult, if not impossible, without the source code freely available.
Our cousins in Sun Identity Manager-land just announced Identity Connectors, an open source project providing a framework and toolkit for creating Identity Manager connectors, as well as 8 connector bundles covering systems from AD to DB2 to VMS, with Google Apps coming soon. The Identity Connectors blog is the place to watch for more info.

That wraps things up for this week. Don't forget, if you're planning to attend the European Identity Conference 2009 in May, the second OpenSSO Community Day will be there on the Tuesday, May 5 2009. Register at Meetup and you can pick up a discount code for 20% off the cost of your EIC registration. Bargain!

@ 10:17 AM PDT Comments [1]

17 May · Sat 2008

links for 2008-05-17
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