Talking Identity

The latest release of Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle's best-in-class user provisioning and administration solution, has finally hit the shelves (so to speak). Release 9.1 has been eagerly anticipated for a while now, and brings with it a host of new features and usability improvements. Below are some of the highlights of the release (You can get a complete rundown here.

• Brand new Graphical Workflow Designer
• Major enhancements to the Generic Technology Connector (first introduced in OIM 9.0.3, and discussed here)
• Enhancements to the Attestation Framework
• Enhanced support for Multiple Authorities of Identity Information
• Support for inbound SPML v2.0 provisioning requests (via web services)
• Richer constraints in Password Policies
• New Connector Installation Wizard

The release also includes a number of fixes, enhancements aimed at improving usability and manageability of the product, and greater platform support.

One of the impressions that seem to exist out there is that after acquiring products, Oracle focuses more on integration projects and less on feature development and innovation. That couldn't be farther from the truth, and hopefully this release will prove that. While there usually is a post-acquisition lull in terms of releases, it is usually to accommodate the cost of assimilating into the machinery of a big company, and the expansion into a global marketplace. This involves improving platform and language coverage, and porting over to the new release processes and standards. And priorities also tend to shift dramatically when you go from being a startup product to one from an established software vendor.

But one thing that the Oracle Identity Management team has been very good at is listening to our customers and the marketplace. Most of the work in release 9.1 has been driven out of recommendations from our Customer Advisory Board and feedback from the marketplace.

In the coming weeks, I will write in greater detail about some of the major additions to the product in release 9.1. If there are specific topics that you would like to know about, send those in to me and I will see what I can do.

In further evidence that OpenID is about to go mainstream in a big way, the big players in the consumer identity space - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Verisign (along with IBM) - have joined the OpenID foundation, and are even going to have representatives on the board of directors. Tireless OpenID advocate (and board member) Johannes Ernst has a great blog post about it here, and you can read more about this move here.

While some worry that the entry of such corporate entities could change the focus of what (till now) has been a community and consumer-oriented project, I weigh that against the fact that OpenID would not be relevant in consumer identity unless these players not only accepted it, but championed it. So I think this is a great thing for OpenID.

I am hoping the next step will be that these services start accepting 3rd party OpenIDs instead of just being providers. I look forward to using my Google OpenID at Yahoo.

The Eclipse Foundation today announced the 1.0 release of Higgins, the first real software framework that enables developers to integrate user-centric identity technologies and protocols into their applications. It's multi-protocol and
platform-agnostic architecture is key in making the process of integrating identity into their applications attractive to developers of web applications.

It's a big achievement, and the first concrete step towards an identity layer for the internet. My congratulations to Paul, Mary and all the contributors to the Higgins project.