Catching up with the latest in identity management

No single topic today as I try to catch up with “things I’ve been meaning to share with you that aren’t long enough or detailed enough to devote an entire newsletter.”

*Get educated

First a reminder about a couple of educational opportunities that are soon coming up. Novell’s BrainShare is in April this year (it’s traditionally in March). It’s the single largest source of information about eDirectory and the various Nsure products that loosely fit under the identity management tent. Visit https://www.novell.com/brainshare/ for all the details and registration, then look at the sessions available in the Nsure track (currently 91, but that’s dynamic).

For you Active Directory aficionados, Microsoft’s TechED conference comes along about a month after BrainShare closes (in Dallas, Texas this year). While AD is not as big a part of TechED as eDirectory is to BrainShare it’s still a good place for people involved in creating identity management services to learn more about Microsoft’s entry in the directory sweepstakes.

*Bravo Octetstring

Last fall (“OctetString does a good deed”, https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2002/01596972.html) I talked about the suburban Chicago company’s donation to the OpenLDAP project of a Java Database Connector (JDBC) bridge to any standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-enabled directory. But there’s more to the story. Octetstring didn’t write the bridge. Turns out that a potential user queried the OpenLDAP discussion forum about the existence of such a device. Octetstring then doled out a grant to have the bridge created – by the user who originally inquired about it! Bravo Octetstring!

*Free Active Directory book

Still in the realm of free stuff, my friends at NetPro in Phoenix (and you shouldn’t overlook their Active Directory Experts Conference, scheduled between BrainShare and TechED. See https://www.netpro.com/welcome/declink/) have once again teamed up with realtimepublishing.com to provide a free electronic book.

Titled, “The Tips and Tricks Guide to Active Directory Troubleshooting,” the book is a follow-on and companion to the “Definitive Guide to Active Directory Troubleshooting” that these two organizations brought out last fall.

The new book is laid-out in a Q&A format that makes it useful as a quick reference guide when you don’t necessarily need in-depth discussion. As with all realtimepublishing.com ebooks, it will be available on a chapter by chapter basis to those who register at https://www.netpro.com/ebook so head over there right now.

*Get Novell’s DSML code

For developers, Novell has released Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) support for eDirectory and it can be downloaded for free by going to https://developer.novell.com/dsml

Novell’s DSML code is also available to the open source community at http://www.OpenLDAP.org

By downloading DSML support, you can also receive Novell’s Web services engine, jBroker Web, and Novell’s exteNd WorkBench development environment, giving you many of the tools you need to begin building applications immediately. Remember, too, that SourceID (http://www.sourceid.org) has released a complete Java toolkit for implementing the Liberty Alliance Protocol v.1.1 Single Sign-On with new or existing Java-based Web projects.

So there you have it: a bunch of useful free stuff along with some pointers to educational opportunities in the identity management line. Enjoy!