* Why the name-change to Identity Management?
A big change is happening to this newsletter today, but before going into that I need to issue a correction and a clarification.
First, the correction. Last week I extolled the virtues of an offering from OctetString that allows you to easily view and manage multiple Active Directory forests. The only problem is, I got the product name wrong. It’s actually called Directory Federator Express which makes a whole lot more sense than “DB Proxy” (the name I used last week). DB Proxy is actually the name of OctetString’s Lightweight Directory Access Protocol to Relational Database Proxy tool, which is quite good in its own right but has nothing to do with Active Directory! My apologies for any confusion.
I also referred a couple of times to remarks attributed to Sun Vice President Barbara Gordon supposedly blaming Sun’s recent quarterly loss on Novell’s new practice of giving away eDirectory. Gordon did identify Novell (and IBM) as competitors in the directory services space that are becoming more aggressive and she did say this in response to questions about Sun’s announced quarterly loss of $2.3 billion (on sales of $2.9 billion). But she didn’t actually blame Novell for the loss. That was a connection made by a wire service reporter in his story. You can draw your own conclusions.
And now, back to the scheduled programming. September of 1999 was a milestone in the history of directory services. As Novell was preparing to launch NDS 8 and eDirectory, Microsoft was polishing off Active Directory, Banyan was abandoning the directory market, and the proponents of Directory Service Markup Language were making tentative moves, Network World launched this Directory Services newsletter.
In the three and a half years since then, we’ve watched as the directory industry grow from being an unknown component of the network to a fierce battleground as more directory-enabled services were introduced. Lately though, the directory has again drifted below the horizon – not because it’s no longer needed, but precisely because it is needed. The directory is now part of the infrastructure for the loose collection of new age technologies called “Web services.” In particular, Web services rely on identity management and identity management requires a directory platform.
A press release I saw last week was headed “Novell Helps Developers Bridge the Gap Between Web Services and Directories.” That’s the role identity management must play – the bridge between the directory platform and the multitude of services being deployed over the network.
In reality, this newsletter has spent a lot of time in the past year talking about identity management and little time discussing the intricacies of the various directories. That’s good. That means that one of my missions – to spread the gospel of directories to all corners of the technology world – has pretty much been completed. So it’s time to move on.
I’m not leaving, but starting today we have changed the name and the focus of the newsletter. From now on the newsletter will be called Identity Management.
The reality is that we’ve been talking about identity management all along so we’re just changing the name to better help the new people learn what we (you and I) are all about. If you don’t bother reading the title, then you shouldn’t notice any difference. I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, and I hope you’ll keep reading it and telling me what you think.
