The fun never stops in Identity World

Boy, it was an exhausting September. There was a lot going on between work, Digital ID World, Oracle OpenWorld and the Burton Identity Services Working Group. Unfortunately, this left me little time to write on this blog. But hopefully all of you were able to follow my real-time thoughts on Twitter. If you are interested, check out my DIDW tweets and my OpenWorld tweets.

It was interesting to see the amount of discussion going on around the topic of Identity Services. At DIDW, there were a number of different sessions that looked at different parts of the Identity Services challenge. Kim Cameron talked about claims-based identity transactions in his keynote. All the different discussions on Liberty’s Identity Assurance Framework were trying to deal with improvements needed in the authentication service. Some of the necessary standards discussions came up in the session on “Bootstrapping Identity Protocols”. And of course Jamie Lewis talked about it in his keynote.

At OpenWorld I once again took on the task of trying to illuminate the masses on identity services. It isn’t a topic that usually gets a lot of interest at OpenWorld, since the attendees are mostly interested in figuring out real world implementation issues. So the sessions most attended were the ones that looked at best practices and customer case studies. Also, being scheduled for the first session of the day at 9am didn’t help drive up my attendance numbers.

But I did get a pretty decent crowd, all things considered, and got some good questions and very good feedback and validation on the content of my presentation. I did try to spice it up by throwing in a bit of humor centered around “The Love Guru” (since identity services is all about achieving identity nirvana); not sure if that helped or hurt. I wanted to post the presentation here for all of you, but OOW presentations are paid content controlled by Oracle, so I can’t. But I will be adapting that presentation for some talks I am giving to customers on the topic of Identity Services, and I will post that presentation, along with a discussion of how my architecture has evolved, in an upcoming blog post.

October is looking to be just as busy. Of course there is all the usual stuff going on at Oracle. Tomorrow I’ll be doing a quick dash across the border and back for the second all-day workshop of the ISWG. Then later this month I will be heading to Europe, where I will be meeting with some customers and attending Burton’s European edition of the Catalyst Conference. I will be part of a panel that includes other ISWG members from TD Bank, BT, Credit Suisse, IBM, Sun, Novell and, of course, Burton that will be talking about Identity Services and presenting some of the work we have done in the working group. Catalyst Europe is in Prague, which is a city I absolutely love, so I am pretty excited about that too. Should be a fun month.