Thor updates Xellerate to help define roles

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: DAVE KEARNS ON IDENTITY MANAGEMENT
07/13/05
Today's focus: Thor updates Xellerate to help define roles

Dear security.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Thor releases Xellerate 8.5
* Links related to Identity Management
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Thor updates Xellerate to help define roles

By Dave Kearns

I'm in San Diego this week for The Burton Group's annual
Catalyst Conference. This year there are four tracks, but you
and I know that the real track to watch is identity - the only
one that's been offered for all 13 years of the event.

As always, there is expected to be a lot of announcements of new
products, services and alliances. We'll get to most of those in
the next few weeks, and today I'll start with two announcements
from Thor Technologies.

I actually caught up with John Aisien, Thor vice president of
marketing and business development, the week before the
conference. I was on the phone in my office; Aisien was in his
car headed up the Interstate to Thor's headquarters in
Pleasanton, Calif. At least, I hope he pulled off the road
before talking to me. Aisien can be very demonstrative when he
speaks, not a good thing to do at 70 miles per hour!

The big news from Thor was that its identity management product,
Xellerate, has been updated and released as Version 8.5. In
addition, with this new release is a new technical partnership
that could be very useful to those embarking on an identity
management project. More on that in a moment.

The major new piece in Xellerate is a graphical workflow tool.
This should allow workflow developers to quickly determine if
they have modeled provisioning and user-approval processes
correctly, especially with those always-tortuous exception case
flows. It should also provide non-technical people (executives
and auditors, for example) with a better insight into the
handling of exceptions, rejection workflows and other
non-standard behaviors. A picture really can be worth a thousand
words.

There's also been a major improvement in the Deployment Manager
functionality of Xellerate. It's now Web-based and has been
enhanced to support collaborative development environments. This
hopefully will render change management of high-value system
metadata more intuitive, promoting migration of configured
rules, policies, workflows, resource adapters and other
information from development to quality assurance and finally to
production environments.

And speaking of rules and policies, I'm reminded of roles, which
is the subject of the second major announcement from Thor.

Not only was it announced, but it was also demonstrated that
Xellerate can now easily consume the output of Bridgestream's
SmartRoles business roles automation package. According to
Aisien, "This will enable organizations to automate and enforce
employees' access to information, applications and systems based
on their pre-defined business roles, duties, interdependencies
and relationships. For example, access rights to specific
applications can be provisioned as employees work on particular
projects and de-provisioned as soon as they complete the
project."

SmartRoles isn't a role-mining application (such as Eurikify's
Sage tool) but a system that helps you define roles within your
business environment. In other words, it's a way to get roles
that enforce the rules and policies you have in place rather
than roles that simply reflect the current (and, perhaps,
inefficient or even vulnerable) practices you have in place.
Visit <http://www.bridgestream.com/products.php> to learn more
about SmartRoles and see if it can't be useful to your identity
management project. We already know that Xellerate could be
useful.

RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

IBM offers digital certificates to banks
Network World, 07/11/05
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/071105-ibm.html?rl
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Dave Kearns

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's
written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print
"Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be
found at Virtual Quill <http://www.vquill.com/>.

Kearns is the author of three Network World Newsletters: Windows
Networking Tips, Novell NetWare Tips, and Identity Management.
Comments about these newsletters should be sent to him at these

respective addresses: <mailto:windows@vquill.com>,
<mailto:netware@vquill.com>, <mailto:identity@vquill.com>.

Kearns provides content services to network vendors: books,
manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing,
technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill
provides "words to sell by..." Find out more by e-mail at
<mailto:info@vquill.com>
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Fluke Networks
Special Report: Understanding the Changing Nature of Branch
Office Networks

Significant revenue is generated at the branch office. Business
needs to be seamless between locations. This special report
provides an approach to a resourceful way of using new tools and
analysis for branch offices. Learn about the analysis and
tools used to run a seamless branch business, click here to
download the report now,
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=108348
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ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the Identity Management newsletter:
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE
TEN WAYS TO STOP SPYWARE

You will get spam down to a manageable level this year, but then
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eradicate all the unwanted activity at the office, at home.
Here's a ten step guide you can follow to curb the spyware
problem:
<http://www.networkworld.com/nldsv3136>
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