* Thor releases Xellerate 8.5
I’m in San Diego this week for The Burton Group’s annual Catalyst Conference. This year there are four tracks, but you and I know that the real track to watch is identity – the only one that’s been offered for all 13 years of the event.
As always, there is expected to be a lot of announcements of new products, services and alliances. We’ll get to most of those in the next few weeks, and today I’ll start with two announcements from Thor Technologies.
I actually caught up with John Aisien, Thor vice president of marketing and business development, the week before the conference. I was on the phone in my office; Aisien was in his car headed up the Interstate to Thor’s headquarters in Pleasanton, Calif. At least, I hope he pulled off the road before talking to me. Aisien can be very demonstrative when he speaks, not a good thing to do at 70 miles per hour!
The big news from Thor was that its identity management product, Xellerate, has been updated and released as Version 8.5. In addition, with this new release is a new technical partnership that could be very useful to those embarking on an identity management project. More on that in a moment.
The major new piece in Xellerate is a graphical workflow tool. This should allow workflow developers to quickly determine if they have modeled provisioning and user-approval processes correctly, especially with those always-tortuous exception case flows. It should also provide non-technical people (executives and auditors, for example) with a better insight into the handling of exceptions, rejection workflows and other non-standard behaviors. A picture really can be worth a thousand words.
There’s also been a major improvement in the Deployment Manager functionality of Xellerate. It’s now Web-based and has been enhanced to support collaborative development environments. This hopefully will render change management of high-value system metadata more intuitive, promoting migration of configured rules, policies, workflows, resource adapters and other information from development to quality assurance and finally to production environments.
And speaking of rules and policies, I’m reminded of roles, which is the subject of the second major announcement from Thor.
Not only was it announced, but it was also demonstrated that Xellerate can now easily consume the output of Bridgestream’s SmartRoles business roles automation package. According to Aisien, “This will enable organizations to automate and enforce employees’ access to information, applications and systems based on their pre-defined business roles, duties, interdependencies and relationships. For example, access rights to specific applications can be provisioned as employees work on particular projects and de-provisioned as soon as they complete the project.”
SmartRoles isn’t a role-mining application (such as Eurikify’s Sage tool) but a system that helps you define roles within your business environment. In other words, it’s a way to get roles that enforce the rules and policies you have in place rather than roles that simply reflect the current (and, perhaps, inefficient or even vulnerable) practices you have in place. Visit https://www.bridgestream.com/products.php to learn more about SmartRoles and see if it can’t be useful to your identity management project. We already know that Xellerate could be useful.
