A lot of smaller items have been accumulating in my "need to mention this in the newsletter" stack, so I'll use this issue to clear out a few.

Last issue, I talked about Sun's identity announcements from the recent JavaOne conference, but Novell also had a fairly big presence at the show and took the opportunity to announce a new Novell exteNd Composer connector for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories. (Composer is the development environment for the Web services application server Novell acquired when it purchased SilverStream.) Since identity management is the crucial technology for Web services, this could improve Novell's chances in that very competitive arena.

Last week's topic of "E-provisioning's dirty little secret" (http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2003/0609ds1.html) brought a number of reminders about two other companies in the "data cleansing" and "role analysis" fields.

A number of folks mentioned their satisfaction with Eurekify's SAGE Analyzer, a tool used to identify potential role-based policies for an organization. Others mentioned SeeBeyond's e*Index, which creates unified views of seemingly disparate data in multiple repositories by identifying objects across disparate systems and automatically building a cross-index of the many different local identifiers used to represent the same object. If you don't need the all-encompassing services of Business Layer's Role-Out, which I talked about last week, than perhaps Eurekify or SeeBeyond could better fill your need.

The SourceID organization has released a .Net version of its open source Liberty Alliance enabler technology called The SourceID Identity Platform. This is an Alpha-version port of the previously released Java code - it's not for production use yet, but it does give you something to work with as you develop both Java and .Net versions of your whiz-bang, "killer app" Web services programs.

NetPro has moved its fall Directory Experts Conference from Barcelona to Ottawa. Better book early, the tourists just flock to Ottawa when parliament's in session. The conference is also one week too early (September 14-17), since the Senators' first exhibition hockey match isn't until the 20th. But you should still be able to learn a lot about Active Directory (because, evidently, there won't be much else to do).

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