The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Identity Management

Okay - our IT director came in thsi morning and said we are going to implement Identity Management.

And either we buy (maybe layoffs) or build (maybe migraine).

Before today I had only cursory knowledge of Identity management (IM) - it offers single sign-on etc.

I have surf info on IM in Google - there are tons of info on IM but hard finding concrete examples on an actual implementation is a large organization.

material from vendors are basically prpaganda.

Does anyone know of a good article on an actual IM implementation?

My understanding of IM, at the moment, is hazy at best.

Ram Dass
Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Ram - This is what I do for a living. Email me and I'll send you details on what our company has done. One question, Single Sign-On can be a part of Identity Management but they are not one in the same, so are you interested in SSO specifically?

Regards,
m

m
Tuesday, October 21, 2003

There is a company up here that specialize in this kind of thing.. have done for quite a while. Not totally sure but it might be worth checking them out. The name is Once Corp and I think their web site is www.oncecorp.com they have a couple of products that do this kind of thing but I'm not sure how it's managed.

I've checked the site and they seem to have bled into big site consulting to the banks and to Govt - but the product is, I think, called "verify@once".. not totally sure.

I find myself wishing you guys would discuss this openly - I find the topic interesting and don't have the first clue..

Sue Canada
Tuesday, October 21, 2003

We use Tivoli Access Manager for SSO and Active Directory for all the actual storage.

It's a fairly nifty idea, unfortunately it's too unstable / flaky. Odds are that's just our systems people though.

I guess my main warning would be, whatever you decide to use, make sure it *actually does what the vendor says*. ie. ask for working demos with example code etc.

Nice theory, Bad practice
Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Phil Windley has some materials on his blog http://www.windley.com/ that might interest you.

Just me (Sir to you)
Wednesday, October 22, 2003