| Federated provisioning could exist Today we'll wrap up our current discussion of federated provisioning. That's easy, because there really is no such thing today. But there might be if reason prevails. Let me tell you about it. How a universal directory might work Provisioning across organizational boundaries using either traditional technologies or those associated with federation has been our subject the past few issues. In the last newsletter, the subject of a universal directory was mentioned. Today let's see how that might work. The other federation technology While we've seen, over the past few issues, that federated provisioning still has a long way to go there's another technology, an older technology, which might bear another look. Enterprise Provisioning vs. Federated Provisioning When last we spoke I left you thinking about deprovisioning both your people from apps you don't control or your apps from people you don't control. It's a big issue with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and federated provisioning. It was the Burton Group's Ian Glazer who said: "...there should be no reason why deprovsioning from an application like Salesforce.com is any harder than deprovisioning from LDAP." And, in truth, maybe it isn't. Provisioning and federation Federated provisioning is the topic, and the raging dispute about its pros and cons is today's subject. It started with the comment by Daniel Wakeman (CIO, Educational Testing Service), who said "It's a 'huge shortcoming' that SaaS [Software-as-a-Service] vendors do not embrace 'federated identity management' standards allowing centralized identification and validation of users via a single sign-on process..." The promise of provisioning Way back in the dark ages, 10 whole years ago, I first wrote about provisioning as the "killer app" for Identity Management. Actually, I called it the killer app for directory services, since the identity management tag hadn't yet been promulgated. In a piece I wrote for Novell's Web site (now, sadly, no longer available), I touted Business Layer's eProvision Employee application and talked about what was to come. Sometimes prognosticators are wrong. Video: DEMO 09: Purewire checks online reputations Purewire's Purewire Trust service lets users check out the online reputation of people, Web sites and things to make sure bad stuff doesn't happen to Web surfers. Who goes there? Identity management is all about who you are and what you should be allowed to do. This Product Guide describes the technology and how it works. Enter for a Microsoft training giveaway from New Horizons New Horizons Computer Training is offering a free Microsoft training course worth up to $2,500 to be given to one lucky Microsoft Subnet reader. Deadline for entry is March 31. Network World on Twitter Get our tweets and stay plugged in to networking news. |
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