Month: July 2008

Johannes talks about the OpenID RP “Problem”

Johannes Ernst has responded to my post on what I view as a problem for OpenID – the proliferation of OpenID Providers without the emergence of Relying Parties that use them. First of all, let me state for the record that I am a big fan of OpenID, and in no way view this problem

The Optimist is feeling a little pessimistic

Seems like the recent Catalyst conference led the Eternal Optimist, Pam Dingle, to question how we are doing as an industry. It is true that a lot of the messaging has shifted from what enterprises need to accomplish based on their unique needs to “check-off the list” buzzwords like GRC (which Bob Blakely called a

OpenIDs problems don’t seem to be going away

I got news today that MySpace is joining the OpenID revolution. This supposedly brings the number of OpenID-enabled accounts to over half a billion. Maybe it looks like good news for OpenID, but isn’t this actually a problem? Isn’t the intent of OpenID to reduce the number of logins we have? Why am I moving

Is AD really the dominant Identity Store out there?

James McGovern has challenged my position that applications should not be written to go directly against AD. And he got the backing of Jackson Shaw in this argument. James says: If pretty much every Fortune 500 enterprise has Active Directory, why should any of them consider yet another product? Martin (no last name) left a

Delving deeper into Relationship-based RBAC

Ian Glazer thinks that I have opened Pandora’s box by talking about the need to bring context and intent into the area of RBAC by using relationships (one of many ways to express context). I think it’s a topic ripe for some discussion, so I’m glad to be the one taking the lid off. Mat

To AD or not to AD

Ashraf Motiwala has called me out for saying that the way applications are supporting AD directly as the identity store is by using Virtual Directory, both in a comment on my post, and on his blog. I guess in my enthusiasm to get a response out to Matt’s post, I wasn’t careful enough about my

Getting the Last Word In on Metadirectories

I doubt it. I doubt that there will be a last word on metadirectories for a long time to come. Technology that works has a way of sticking around, even when they have outlived their purpose, and are forced into the substrate of a new and improved “solution”. But I did want to respond to

Information Cards gets its own Foundation

One of the big announcements at Catalyst that I twittered about was the formation of the Information Card Foundation (take that, OpenID). The purpose of the non-profit foundation is to promote the use of information cards as a secure way to present personal identity information on the web. The foundation has a power-packed set of

The Real World: Catalyst Conference Edition

Another Catalyst conference has come and gone, leaving us with a lot of material to chew on and ponder. Burton always forces us to think about what we are doing, especially those of us that have products to deliver. And it’s always interesting to see all the new companies that are popping up in the