Year: 2008

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

I’m Back Online with the New (and Improved?) Oracle Blogs

We’ll see about the improved part. But the long awaited migration of the blogging platform (check out some details here) to Movable Type has finally gone live (phase 1, that is), and I am back to blogging again. Being knee-deep in Catalyst last week means that I missed the week-long period where we could check

Follow me at Catalyst

I’ll be at the Catalyst conference next week, looking to share and learn. I expect Catalyst to be the usual source of inspiration, news and ideas. And I look forward to meeting up with fellow identirati like Ian, Mark and of course, the good folks from Burton. Unfortunately, a quirk of timing means that a

Must-Have Characteristics of an Identity Services Layer

Mark Dixon has just written a post about the critical characteristics an Identity Services layer must have to become part of Enterprise architecture. These characteristics are born from the idea that identity services will become to enterprise applications what dialtone was to the (extremely successful) telephone service – the very backbone on which it all