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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

A universal directory system: Good ideas aren't always enough

Readers comment on Novell's concept of a universal directory system
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Spotlight Story
A universal directory system: Good ideas aren't always enough

Dave Kearns By Dave Kearns
Last week's newsletter ("The other federation technology") about Novell's mid 90's concept of a universal directory system brought out a number of comments that I'd like to share. Read full story

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.

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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.

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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.

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