Superpatterns Pat Patterson on the Cloud, Identity and Single Malt Scotch

Thomson Reuters on deploying OpenSSO Enterprise to a Global User Base

About a month ago, Nick mentioned a presentation that Chris Lucock, head of Enterprise Architecture desktop products for Thomson Reuters, had given at March's Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit in London. The video for this presentation has just gone online and, like the last Gartner video I blogged, by Damo Bashyam of Verizon Wireless, it's got some great information on a large scale real world deployment of OpenSSO Enterprise.

In the video, Chris explains how OpenSSO is on track to provide single sign-on across Thomson Reuters' Markets services to 330,000 users worldwide by the end of 2011. In many ways it's a very different deployment to Verizon Wireless; 1% of the user base in terms of sheer numbers, but far more complex in terms of the services provided. One example: Thomson Reuters have implemented 'exclusive access', controlling the numbers of concurrent users of third party services (and thus Thomson Reuters' costs) by ensuring that each user only has a single session active at any time, for example, terminating a desktop session left open over lunch when a user logs in from their mobile phone. Another good one: single sign-on is provided across services delivered by the public internet and Thomson Reuters' private network, again allowing cost savings as streaming video can be more cheaply delivered via the internet while sensitive financial data is more tightly controlled.

There's much more in the video, including integrations with Siebel and the Reuters Messaging product, so spend a few minutes with Chris, exploring OpenSSO at Thomson Reuters...

Federating to Google Apps with OpenSSO – Open Source Starter Kit

It's been possible to configure OpenSSO for single sign-on (SSO) to Google Apps ever since Google implemented the SAML 2.0 protocol for federated SSO back in 2006. Last year, I covered Wajih Ahmed and Marina Sum's article on implementing SSO between OpenSSO and Google Apps, which described precisely how to quickly get it up and running. The process took about 10 or 15 minutes, but involved editing an XML configuration file, which does introduce some, uh, opportunity for user error.

So, we looked at how we could streamline the process, making it as foolproof as possible, and, in OpenSSO Express Build 7, built a task flow specifically for federating with Google Apps. The new task flow is described in one of the first open source starter kits for Sun's identity products - Federating to Google Apps with OpenSSO (the other starter kit covers setting up OpenDS as a Naming Service for OpenSolaris). We now have the process down to less than four minutes, and it's so easy, even a smoking monkey can do it

New and Updated Policy Agents for OpenSSO

We released four new 'version 3.0' policy agents for OpenSSO today:

• Apache Tomcat 6.x - documentation, download
• IBM WebSphere Application Server 6.1/7.0 - documentation, download
• JBoss Application Server 4.x - documentation, download
• Sun Java System Proxy Server 4.0 - (documentation link coming soon), download

These join the existing version 3.0 policy agents for Sun Glassfish Enterprise Server (formerly known as Sun Java System Application Server) 8.x/9.x (documentation, download) and Oracle/BEA WebLogic Server/Portal 10 (documentation, download). While the 3.0 agents add centralized configuration and some other features, it's important to note that all of the version 2.2 agents are tested and supported with OpenSSO.

OpenSSO Tab Sweep – Apr 17 2009

A celebration this week and events over the next month in the world of OpenSSO...

• OpenSSO is 1000 members strong! Many more than 1000 people have downloaded OpenSSO (in fact, there are well over 1000 downloads every month), but 1000 people have registered at opensso.dev.java.net to be able to participate in the mailing lists and forums, and to be able to file and track issues. All I can say is... wow!
• If you're going to the RSA Conference next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, don't miss The Smoking Monkey and I presenting A Pragmatic Approach to Building Identity Management for the Enterprise. We'll be in the Briefing Center on Wednesday April 22, 2009 at 5:30pm. More details and a qualification code for a FREE Expo pass [PDF].
• If, on the other hand, you're planning to take in the MySQL Conference next week, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, the OpenSSO team's very own Sean Brydon will be moderating a 'birds of a feather' (BoF) session - Using the OpenSSO Project and MySQL to Secure Users and Applications - at 8:30pm on Tuesday April 21st, 2009 in Ballroom C. If you're thinking of coming, but hadn't planned to attend the MySQL Conference, you might be interested to know that a $25 Exhibit Hall Only Pass will get you into all the BoF's. Register Here.
• A little bit further out, registration is still open for the second OpenSSO Community Day, to be held at the Forum am Deutschen Museum in Munich (hosted by the European Identity Conference 2009) on Tuesday May 5th 2009. The first Community Day last month in New York City was a great success, with nine sessions on a variety of identity-related topics. We'll be using the 'unconference' format again in Munich, so come along and join in!
• At the European Identity Conference proper, I'll be participating in the Realigning AuthZ and Access Control with the Business panel, alongside Bavo De Ridder (De Ridder Consulting), John Aisien (Oracle), Kim Cameron (Microsoft), Keith Grayson (SAP) and Finn Frisch (Axiomatics), at 11:30am on Wednesday May 6th, 2009. If you're staying in Munich for the entire week, be sure to catch Sun's Dr. Steffo Weber and Abdi Mohammadi, along with Vittorio Bertocci of Microsoft for Hands-On SOA and Web Security with the Geneva Framework and with OpenSSO.
• Alternatively, later that same week are Sun Microsystems' Northern Europe Open IAM User days. Spanning Thursday and Friday May 7th-8th, 2009, the user days will be held at Sun's Belgian office at Zaventem, just east of Brussels. I'll be speaking on Thursday, when we'll be focusing on OpenSSO and OpenDS, while Friday will be more oriented towards Sun Identity Manager and Sun Role Manager. Register now for what promises to be a fascinating couple of days.

So - there you have it - a packed few weeks in OpenSSO-land, and evidence that the OpenSSO community is as active IRL (in real life) as on IRC (Internet relay chat)

Out Now – OpenSSO Express Build 7!

As announced yesterday on the OpenSSO users mailing list, OpenSSO Express Build 7 is now available!. Congratulations and thanks to the OpenSSO team for their hard work, and to the whole OpenSSO community for continued support in the form of issue reports, patches and other contributions.

So, what's new in Express Build 7? Here are some highlights - full details are in the release notes

• The first phase of support for OpenDS as an external user store.
• Easy single sign-on integration with Google Apps.
• The Fedlet can now sign the SAML 2.0 authentication request and decrypt encrypted attributes in the response.
• Virtual Federation (also known as SAE) now supports encrypted attributes.
• IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0, Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 (10.3) and GlassFish Prelude 3 are now supported web containers.
• About a gazillion other enhancements and fixes.

The other question going through your mind may be "What on earth is an 'Express Build', anyway?". The short answer is that an OpenSSO Express build is a supported 'snapshot' of development between full 'OpenSSO Enterprise' releases. The long answer is on the OpenSSO wiki.

OpenSSO on Java.net front page…

Following in Ludo's footsteps I have to say thank you to Marina for getting OpenSSO onto the java.net front page:

As Ludo mentioned, Marina is looking for new opportunities - if you need a top flight technical author, then email me at and I'll pass your message on to her.

OpenSSO Tab Sweep – Mar 27 2009

As always, a bumper crop of OpenSSO news from the last couple of weeks...

• One piece of advice I often give to people wrestling with tricky issues relating to redirects and cookies is to download the LiveHTTPHeaders Firefox plugin, or its IE equivalent ieHTTPHeaders. In Troubleshooting OpenSSO with Firefox Add-Ons, Jim Faut and Rick Palkovic explain just how to use LiveHTTPHeaders and HackBar, which is a new one on me. Where LiveHTTPHeaders gives you detail on the HTTP requests and responses flying back and forth, HackBar lets you drill into the associated data, removing layers of URL and Base64 encoding from URL parameters and HTTP headers. Jim and Rick get right into the detail of the OpenSSO login process, using the tools to uncover what is really going on. A great read for anyone wanting to go under the covers of OpenSSO.
• One that got away from me here on Superpatterns, though Eduardo covered it at The Aquarium - Sidharth Mishra, OpenSSO Technical Product Manager and Ajay Sondhi, OpenSSO Deployment Engineering Manager, presented a webinar last week covering OpenSSO - Overview, Stories and Roadmap last week as part of The Aquarium Channel. Ajay's section includes details of the Verizon Wireless deployment I've mentioned before, so this is well worth investigating if you're interested in ultra high-scale OpenSSO deployments.
• We just got done with CommunityOne East, last week in New York City, CommunityOne West will run alongside JavaOne in San Francisco in June, but did you know about CommunityOne North? On April 15th, CommunityOne comes to the Folketeatret in Oslo, Norway. Flying the flag for OpenSSO will be Jonathan Scudder, a consulting identity architect, with a session on Developing Secure Web Services for the Cloud. More details at the Community One North Content Catalog - Jonathan's session is at 13:00 in Breakout 1.
• While we're 'out in the community', Qingfeng Zhang, a Senior Java Developer at the University of New South Wales, Australia, has posted a video showing how to install and configure OpenSSO on Tomcat on Windows. I know folks often stumble when deploying OpenSSO on Tomcat, since, compared to GlassFish, there are a couple of additional steps required. Qingfeng's video clearly shows how to get it done.
• Back at Sun, Metro supremo Harold Carr presented at the Utah Java Users Group last week on Metro, Jersey, GlassFish, OpenESB and OpenSSO - a real whirlwind tour, particularly since he only had a 20 minute slot! Harold has posted slides, plus Q&A and other notes from the session.
• Finally, DocTeger has rewritten Chapter 11 of the Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0 Technical Overview: Choosing a Federation Option. The new version is much clearer on the relative positions of the various federation protocols - use SAML 2.0 where possible, WS-Federation if you really need to integrate with ADFS, and SAML 1.1 or Liberty ID-FF only if you're connecting to partners with no SAML 2.0 capability. Great job, Michael!

That wraps things up for another week - I'm off to jump in the Patmobile and brave 101. See you next time!

Jobs @ OpenSSO – March 2009

Sun is hiring engineers for OpenSSO and related identity products - we have a number of positions spanning engineering, QA and UI design. If you read my blog regularly, you'll know that OpenSSO is hot stuff - open source single sign-on, federation and secure Web services, delivered as Sun OpenSSO Enterprise and used in deployments large and small.

BTW, we have a referral bonus scheme at Sun, so, please, if you do apply for any of these positions, list me (Pat Patterson, ) as the referrer - I'll buy you lunch once you start

UPDATE - I added another position and updated the publication time... We may have more reqs in the pipeline, so watch this space...

• Entry Level Engineer (0-2 yrs experience) - we're looking for junior folks with some experience in Java, C++, J2EE, XML, servlets, and web technology development. Any middleware experience would be a bonus.
• Senior Quality Engineer (6+ yrs experience) - a rare opportunity to get into one of the best QA teams in the business - OpenSSO QA team manager Indira Thangasamy talks about what's involved.
• Interaction Designer / Information Architect (0-2 yrs experience) - anyone seeing the evolution of Access Manager into OpenSSO over the past few years will have seen our emphasis on ease of use and UI design. We're not done yet, though! We need another UI designer to work on projects across the identity management product line.
• Senior Java-based User Interface Developer (3+ yrs experience) - JSF, RIA, Ajax - buzzword heaven in this UI developer post. The job spec currently says 'Identity Server project management', but it looks like that's a typo for 'Identity Manager' - OpenSSO's provisioning cousin. Unlike the other jobs, which are all Bay Area-based, this one is 'Any US Sun Location' - a great opportunity if you have wicked Java Web UI skills but are based in Colorado, or Massachusetts, or Texas, or...

If those links are no longer by the time you're reading this, then you can use these search links for OpenSSO jobs at Sun and identity-related jobs at Sun.

A Grand OpenSSO Community Day Out in New York

Many thanks to all who attended (I counted at least 50) and spoke at our very first OpenSSO Community Day this past Tuesday in New York City, and to NYU for making available such an excellent facility.

We had a range of speakers: some from the OpenSSO product team, some from other parts of Sun, and even one SI partner - Mike Schwartz from ID-Vault. As promised, we assembled the agenda at the start of the day, and managed to fit in nine 40 minute sessions covering pretty much every aspect of OpenSSO. Almost all the slides are online at the event wiki page (slides, please, Brad!).

If you attended the community day, please complete the Meetup survey - we'd love to have your rating and comments.

The next stop for the OpenSSO Community Day roadshow will be Munich, on May 5. Remember, if you're also planning to attend the European Identity Conference (hosts for our event), you can get 20% off your registration fee by quoting the discount code OPENSSO.

Watch this space for news of OpenSSO Community Day 3.0 - to be held in San Francisco, around the time of CommunityOne West/JavaOne.

OpenSSO Tab Sweep – Mar 13 2009

Lots of news over the last couple of weeks from the world of OpenSSO. Events in New York, new Fedlet innovations and more; read on...

• The first OpenSSO Community Day fast approaches - next Tuesday, March 17 2009 at the NYU Kimmel Center in Greenwich Village, New York City. We're fully booked now, but there are still some folks on the 'maybe' list, so you can sign up on the waiting list and bag a place if one of those maybes turns into a 'no'.
• Late-breaking news for next week - I'll be joining Java evangelist Sang Shin for his Community One East session "OpenSSO: Enterprise Security". We'll be presenting in Breakout Room 4 at 10:10am on Wednesday, March 18 2009.
• One I mentioned over at The Aquarium last week - we've posted the OpenSSO release schedule for the next year. There's lots of detail on the features planned for the next few express builds of OpenSSO, as well as OpenSSO Enterprise 8.1, scheduled for March 2010.
• Giuseppe Gennaro, a recent hire into the OpenSSO engineering team, has blogged about the long-awaited .Net version of our Fedlet. Like its Java cousin, the .Net Fedlet will easily federation-enable .Net applications via SAML 2.0. If you're working with federation in .Net-land, keep an eye on Giuseppe!
• Super Sun SE Jeff Bounds doesn't blog often, but when he does, it's all goodness. His most recent entry is OpenSSO Authentication with Active Directory (Part 1), expanding on the OpenSSO documentation to provide a step-by-step tutorial for using OpenSSO with AD, chock-full of screenshots. More great stuff for the Microsoft-oriented.
• Hot on the heels of my recent entry pointing out the interaction between SAML and XACML, Steven Jarosz, another star Sun SE, has started to document some interesting ways of deploying the Fedlet, the first being a XACML policy enforcement point (PDP). People sometime ask me "How does open source make a difference in identity at Sun?" - this is a perfect example - these innovative applications would be an order of magnitude more difficult, if not impossible, without the source code freely available.
• Our cousins in Sun Identity Manager-land just announced Identity Connectors, an open source project providing a framework and toolkit for creating Identity Manager connectors, as well as 8 connector bundles covering systems from AD to DB2 to VMS, with Google Apps coming soon. The Identity Connectors blog is the place to watch for more info.

That wraps things up for this week. Don't forget, if you're planning to attend the European Identity Conference 2009 in May, the second OpenSSO Community Day will be there on the Tuesday, May 5 2009. Register at Meetup and you can pick up a discount code for 20% off the cost of your EIC registration. Bargain!