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

Where Social Networking meets Enterprise Applications

You may have heard the term Enterprise 2.0 thrown around a lot recently. The term (allegedly) refers to the idea of bringing all the concepts (and associated hype) seen in the booming social networking arena to bear on how Enterprises go about their business. As seen on Wikipedia: Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise

Concordia tackles Entitlements and Policy Management

Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference is coming up at the end of the month, which means that the work going on in the identity management world kicked up a few notches last month. One of the things that is becoming a fixture at Catalyst is a meeting of the folks involved in Project Concordia. Anyone who

Talking about the Identity Bus/Hub/Provider

There has been a lot of discussion recently on the topic of an Identity Bus (see the recent newsletters by Dave Kearns from May 5, May 7, May 12 and May 14, and some blog posts by Kim Cameron and our own Clayton Donley). The use of the word “Bus” creates some confusion, since what