This week I want to finish up my coverage of the recent Digital ID World (DIDW). I did speak to a lot of people – vendors, customers, analysts and other journalists. What follows, in no particular order, are the high points of some of those discussions.

The week actually started for me before the show even opened when I met with Kuppinger Cole managing director Joerg Resch about the upcoming 2nd European Identity Conference. We’ve tentatively agreed to do a track on “context” (one of my favorite topics), addressing its use in all facets of identity management. I’ll have more about this as the conference approaches, next April.

Imprivata’s Chris Shaw, vice president of R&D assured me that the OneSign single sign-on authentication appliance was still going strong, with a raft of new adapters and is a featured part of its new thrust in the convergence of physical and logical access.

Cyber-Ark VP Adam Bosnian told me about the newest release (v. 4.5) of Enterprise Password Vault, its major software offering for managing all types of privileged identities. You can read more about that product here.

Privaris’ CEO and president John Petze, and COO Mike Kohonoski double-teamed me to talk about the company’s neat little security/authentication device – the PlusID, “the world's first personal biometric fingerprint token.” Take a look for yourself.

New Zealand’s Fronde quadruple-teamed me – four people all speaking in rapid Kiwi trying to explain what they do. It’s not that difficult to comprehend, though, as Fronde provides mobile phone-based software for one-time password generation. Watch for it from your carrier in the near future.

Symantec is a company I haven’t mentioned in a long time as it appears to have settled into its antispam, antivirus groove. But the company realizes that all of the monitoring it’s doing has a place in the compliance audit field. So it announced Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Network Access Control. If you haven’t been looking at Symantec for security and identity access management it might be time to take another look.

Radiant Logic CEO Michel Prompt was joined by Sales VP Dieter Schuller to bring me up to date on the company’s Virtual Directory Server, which just keeps getting better. It now offers identity correlation and synchronization services, for example.

And finally, for this issue, I spent some time with Novell’s Nick Nichols, identity management product manager, Dale Olds, who heads up the Bandit Project, and Bruce Lowry Novell PR guru and spokesperson extraordinaire). The open source, CardSpace-compatible DigitalME offering from the Bandit group and the newly revitalized Novell identity management practice makes Novell worth paying attention to in the identity management space once again.

There’s more, but I’ll keep that for the next issue.

Upcoming events from the IdM Journal calendar:

* Oct. 22–24: RSA Conference
* Oct. 22–26: Interop
* Oct. 22–25: Catalyst, Barcelona, Spain.
* Oct 22: OASIS Identity and Trusted Infrastructure Workshop, Barcelona, Spain.

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