* What’s inside Sentillion’s expreSSO?
Sentillion, very much to its credit, continues to aim squarely at the healthcare market. Paul Roscoe, Sentillion’s president of worldwide sales and marketing, reemphasized that point when I was speaking to him last week about the company’s newest product, expreSSO. Neat name, I wonder why Passlogix didn’t trademark that a year ago. But the name does fit the product – an easy to install, easy to set up and easy to use enterprise simplified sign-on solution.
Roscoe was quick to point out that expreSSO is all new technology; not based on other Sentillion products and not licensed from third parties. And because Sentillion concentrates on the healthcare market, the product can come equipped with drivers and connectors for all the major healthcare applications and services. But also because it’s designed for simplicity, the company claims that – even with the need to add other applications and services (even homegrown ones) – the implementation will never take longer than five days. Initially that implementation will require Sentillion’s own personnel to do the setup and rollout, but eventually it will be a self-contained do-it-yourself service. Roscoe described the process as somewhere between a point-and-click wizard and full-blown scripting. This will be refined over time so that a wizard will handle almost all of a company’s needs for setup and training of the service.
In other respects, it’s what might be termed a “standard” SSO implementation – it will handle username/password for the initial login, of course, but also any stronger authentication scheme you might use. Authentication can also be typed for strength based on workstation, location, or user role. Biometrics, smartcards and proximity cards are supported.
One very nice feature is what’s called “graceful logout”. At the same time the service is being trained in the authentication procedures for an app; it’s also learning what needs to be done to logout of and shut down the app. Should a user’s session need to be terminated because of a timeout, for example, expreSSO will properly shut down any applications that user was running. Wish we’d had something like that when I was a network manager!
As a bonus, expreSSO also includes a self-service password reset module. That alone could save you enough in helpdesk calls to pay for installing the product.
You can find out more about expreSSO at the Sentillion Web site. Typical installations should be under $50/user.
Paul also wanted to talk about the latest Gartner “Magic Quadrant” releases, so we’ll do that next time.
Upcoming Events:
* Oct. 9–11 – Smart Card Alliance Annual Conference, Boston
* Oct. 15-16 – NetIQ NetConnect, Orlando
* Oct. 17-19 – Web 2.0 Summit, San Francisco
Check the upcoming events calendar at the Identity Management Journal and let me know of any I’ve overlooked.
