I fly off today on my summer vacation, but I wanted to blog one last entry to point you to Planet OpenSSO (feed) for all the OpenSSO news over the next few weeks. We have some exciting announcements coming up – stay tuned!!!
Archive for July, 2008
See you in August!
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008OpenSSO nominated for SOA World 2008 Readers’ Choice Award
Thursday, July 10th, 2008 
As Arun just blogged, SOA World magazine has just announced the finalists for its 2008 Readers’ Choice Awards. Sun Access Manager/OpenSSO is nominated for the ‘Best Security Solution‘ category. In fact, a whole bunch of Sun products and projects were nominated across several categories – Arun has a list.
As Arun also mentions, it seems like SOA World haven’t sorted out the voting process yet – the site still invites you to nominate products, even though nominations closed June 22, so you can’t go vote for OpenSSO just yet. Watch this space for an update when voting starts.
SAML and Windows Login
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 
Interesting post from James on the possibilities of Windows desktop systems being SAML identity providers (IdPs). Currently, a similar mechanism exists for desktop single sign-on from Windows (via SPNEGO, using Kerberos tokens, which, by the way, OpenSSO and Access Manager support directly, no IIS ‘bounce’ required), but this is limited to a single enterprise’s AD infrastructure and can be pretty tricky to deploy. It’s easy to imagine IE submitting SAML assertions to service providers at Internet scale in the way James describes. Microsoft seem to be reconsidering the case for supporting SAML 2.0, so they may even be receptive to something like this.
Where James does get things twisted (to use one of his favorite expressions 
) is in imagining that Sun and Oracle have much influence on our friends in Redmond. Microsoft’s paying customers have MUCH more clout than their competitors/partners. I’d suggest, James, that you band together with your peers at enterprises such as GM and Boeing, who I know, from their participation in Concordia, have very similar desires. Heck, you could even roll up your sleeves and dive right in to Concordia – it’s free, very enterprisey and Microsoft participate with open ears…
Gartner: Sun IAM & Open Source – STRONG POSITIVE
Monday, July 7th, 2008 
Via Tatsuo Kudo – Gartner recently published their latest vendor rating for Sun. The overall picture is, well, sunny, if you’ll pardon the pun, but I’m particularly pleased with their ratings in the areas of Identity and Access Management and Open Source – ‘Strong Positive’* for both, which means that OpenSSO and OpenDS must be doubly blessed
* Strong Positive: Is viewed as a provider of strategic products, services or solutions:
Slides from RMLL 2008
Sunday, July 6th, 2008 
I just uploaded my slides and photos from last week’s RMLL conference in Mont-de-Marsan. This was a great event – amazing to see the strength of the open source community in France!
links for 2008-07-06
Sunday, July 6th, 2008-
Handy little utilities, including OpenTerminalHere
OpenSSO Build 4.5
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
It’s been a while since Build 4 of OpenSSO, as we work towards an early access (EA) build of Sun Federated Access Manager 8.0, OpenSSO’s commercial ‘twin’. Our plan designates OpenSSO build 5 as the FAM 8.0 EA, but we still have some minor issues to iron out before we’re ready for EA, hence the release of OpenSSO 1.0 Build 4.5.
Here are some of the new features in Build 4.5, compared to Build 4:
- The Fedlet – quick and easy Federation for SP’s, where you’d rather (slightly) modify your web app than deploy more infrastructure – much more on the Fedlet in the Sun blogosphere.
- Federation Validator – test harness for checking single sign-on between a SAML 2.0 Identity Provider and Service Provider.
- SiteMinder Integration – support for co-existence of OpenSSO and SiteMinder.
Many more enhancements are listed at the bottom of the Build 4.5 release notes. Watch the OpenSSO blogosphere for more details on these new features.
The more I work on OpenSSO, the more I realize the nuances of open source development. The fact that we released this ‘interim’ stable build between builds 4 and 5 is one example of this – the demand for build 4.5 has come from the OpenSSO community, which is now MUCH larger than the FAM team within Sun.
OpenSSO Javapolis Video Online at Parleys.com
Friday, July 4th, 2008 
A few days ago, the good people at JavaPolis (which now seems to be called Javoxx) posted the video for my OpenSSO session from JavaPolis 07 at Parleys.com. Go take a look and see how it compares with the SAML 2.0 session they posted back in February.
Slides from Jazoon 08
Friday, July 4th, 2008 
The slides for my OpenSSO presentation at Jazoon 08 (last week) are now online – just click on the link from the session page at the Jazoon 08 site. If you attended my session, you can give it a rating (out of 5 stars) at that page. You can also see my photos from Jazoon 08 in a Flickr set.
UPDATE (July 8 2008) – pictures from Ludo.
links for 2008-07-01
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008-
Sales Guy vs. Web Dude
