Superpatterns

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!

Crack Sun identity management field operatives Paul Walker and Joachim Andres have put together an amazing demo of Sun's identity stack working with Sun xVM and Secure Global Desktop to provision (and disable!) 'Desktops in the Cloud' to end users. It's an integration tour de force, bringing together a whole slew of Sun products into a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. Cool soundtrack too - well worth 12 minutes of your time. Oh - and make sure you view 'full screen', so you can properly see what's happening - there's quite a lot going on!

• A kinder, gentler federation agreement
  Via James McGovern - BPuhl, an AD engineer in Microsoft's IT department describes one federation partner's approach to information gathering
  (tags: microsoft identity federation)
• A Sun Identity Manger Resource Adapter for Google Apps
  Warren Strange has written a custom resource adapter for Sun Java System Identity Manager, using the Google Provisioning API to manage Google Apps accounts.
  (tags: identity google identitymanager sun idm provisioning resourceadapter)

You might have already seen the news that Identity Manager 7.0 was announced last week at Digital ID World. As Mark, Bob and others have already given you the scoop on this, I'll confine myself here to covering the deltas from the last version (Identity Manager 6 2005Q4):

• Integrated audit capabilities (previously provided via Identity Auditor).
• High-throughput extranet provisioning capabilities (previously provided via Identity Manager Service Provider Edition).
• Policy-based 'Periodic Access Review' (PAR) - 'who has access to what'.
• Business Process Editor (BPE) rewritten as a NetBeans plugin.
• A whole slew of tweaks, fixes and enhancements.
• New Advanced Deployment training course - UPDATE - this course is not specific to Identity Manager 7.0 - it covers advanced topics relevant to IDM 5.5 and above.

So - if you've been looking for the industry leading identity provisioning, and auditing, solution look no further.