Jim Faut and Rick Palkovic have been posting a nice series on how to troubleshoot OpenSSO with Firefox Add-Ons. They just pushed out two more entries in the series, which now includes:

• Part 1: Introduction • Part 2: Single Sign-On and Policy Protection • Part 3: Cross-Domain Single Sign-On • Part 4: Service Provider Initiated Fedlet Single Sign-On • Part 5: Identity Provider Initiated Fedlet SSO Fedlet deployment

These articles are worth a check even if you just want to learn about how OpenSSO works: just follow their diagrams to see the exchange of information between the parties that enable these features.

And, on this topic, you may want to track the participation of the OpenSSO team at next week's Internet Identity WorkShop; see Daniel's note.

And Happy Halloween!

Sun's Identity Team (home to OpenSSO and OpenDS) has just announced a new open source project: Identity Connectors, to bridge between the Identity Manager, which provides auditing and provisioning, and the resources it manages.

The project already has over 12 connectors, from Active Directory to Google Apps. The corresponding version of IdMgr is 8.1, Just Released. Thanks to Tomas and Hanaki for the tip.

This piece of news came up just before holiday break but is still worth posting: the latest patch of Sun's Identity Manager (8.0.0.4) now (again) supports MySQL Enterprise - see the notes from Mani and from Paul. This combination provides another example of how to leverage the different software (and hardware) components into very compelling value-propositions to Sun's customers. In another related example, the Marines Corp is using the Identity Manager, Role Manager, OpenSSO and Directory Server to provide Access and Identity Management Solutions to more than 400K marines; the Goverment is particularly interested in using Open Source to reduce costs (and also to increase security!) BTW, I don't know if MySQL will be used in this particular solution - I'll see if I can find out and share.

Identity Manager is part of Sun's Identity Offerings, which also includes our old friends OpenSSO and OpenDS. The latest release (8.0) includes Improved Role Support, Enhanced Reporting, More Resources, and new platforms. For more details, see: Home, Download (Localized GAs due July 14th) and Docs. IdMgr 8.0 is not (yet?) Open Source (unlike its NetBeans plug-in), but the download is free. IANAL, but my reading of the license seems to imply free RTU with some constraints like a limit to identities used in some use cases.

Otber useful links include:

• Identity Podcasts
• Mani's Summary of the release highlights.
• Companion Role Manager product.
• Bert's Note
• Sean's Cryptic Non-Announcement.