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
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
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
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
In response to my previous blog post about identity services, I received the following question from Billy: “isn’t this what OpenID aims to do? If not, how not?” OpenID can be a small (but key) part of the identity services story. The main problem that OpenID tries to solve is one that most people who
The ever thought-provoking Pamela Dingle has issued a challenge to Enterprise Application vendors. In it, she puts forth the idea that technology and market demand has reached the point where those in the business of building and selling enterprise applications should (must?) figure out how to externalize authentication. But she also points out what has
There has been an interesting discussion going on regarding the fate of metadirectory technology. Dave Kearns talked about it in his newsletter recently (see: Is the metadirectory dead). In it, he quoted Jackson Shaw, who brought it up as context to HP’s recent retrenchment: “Let’s be honest. The meta-directory is dead. Approaches that look like
The Eclipse Foundation today announced the 1.0 release of Higgins, the first real software framework that enables developers to integrate user-centric identity technologies and protocols into their applications. It’s multi-protocol and platform-agnostic architecture is key in making the process of integrating identity into their applications attractive to developers of web applications. It’s a big achievement,
This is the time of year when everyone rolls out their start-of-the-year predictions. You can see a couple of those here and here. I especially loved Anshu Sharma’s take on this popular beginning-of-the-year routine. Predictions are risky business, especially in the slightly schizophrenic world of IdM. On the one hand, things tend to move way
Recently, a few things have reminded me that we still don’t have a clear understanding of how the concept of user-centric identity will fit into the enterprise environments we are so familiar with. But the question keeps coming up, in different forms. Pamela Dingle recently commented on her blog about Patrick Harding’s observations on this