Article: Department of Indian and Northern Affairs gets proactive with Active Directory
Article: 3 Questions: Virtual Directories Simplify Identity Management
Article: Microsoft prepares move on ID management
The biggest additions would be folding Microsoft's Identity Integration Server (MIIS) - a separate product and cornerstone for Microsoft's identity platform - into Windows to add services such as provisioning and password management. The operating system already includes Active Directory, another foundation of Microsoft's identity platform.
The sources said Microsoft was developing new workflow technology for the operating system that would be used to orchestrate the provisioning and other identity services across multiple systems."
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Centrify in the News
Centrify DirectControl Suite Becomes First Solution that Extends Active Directory to Unix/Linux Environments to be Certified for Microsoft Windows 2003 (link)
Centrify Signs on as Gold Sponsor of Directory Experts Conference 2005 (link)
Article: Directory services -- not your father's LDAP
Article: Microsoft Preps a Unified ID Management Suite
It's not clear whether Microsoft will use this week's RSA conference in San Francisco to take the wraps off the new ID-management suite. Regardless, the company is moving full steam ahead to integrate a number of its existing Windows Server applications into such a platform, partners said."
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Mac OS X 10.3.8 released via Software Update
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Socialtext Workspace 1.5 Adds Enterprise and Web Service Integration to Wiki
Article: Real-World GPMC Troubleshooting
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Article: (Almost) Painless Schema Mods
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Centrify Releases DirectControl; Extends Microsoft Active Directory to Easily Manage and Secure Linux/Unix and Java Identities
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Jackson Shaw, Former Microsoft Identity and Access Management Product Manager, Joins Vintela as V.P. of Product Management
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Article: Making Microsoft Support Linux: Centrify To Compete with Vintela
"It's got software - called the Centrify DirectControl suite - that makes Microsoft's Active Directory (AD) cross-platform and seamlessly extends real-time AD authorization, authentication and Group Policy capabilities to Linux and Unix as well as J2EE and applications servers such as Apache and JBoss.
It will reportedly make them all live in a happy nirvana of single sign-on by centralizing all user accounts in Active Directory, and strengthen security by enforcing global password policies and eliminating orphan accounts.
It says it's the only company that can do this."
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Javelina Software Announces the Release of ADtoolkit v3.0
"ADtoolkit’s new move tools will arm Active Directory administrators with the ability to keep up with the changes that occur every day in business. Administrators will not need to spend extra time writing extensive scripts to keep up with these changes.
In addition to the new move tools in ADtoolkit v3.0, there are many enhancements to the current tools that are also customer driven. One of these new features is the ability to copy information from the report output screens and paste it into the other ADtoolkit tools, such as Modify User. For example, by generating a report of a list of soon to expire users, admins can right click to copy the resulting list of user names, and then paste it directly into the grid on the Modify Users tool. Simply set a new expiration date, and run the tool to quickly make changes to the entire list."
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Article: Fazam GPAnywhere version 1.6: Get into Group Policy
Article: Windows Server 2003 Domain Renaming with Exchange Server 2003
NetPro’s Directory Experts Conference 2005 to Showcase Leading Industry Analysts
Article: Sun, Microsoft Breaking SOA Barriers
UDDI - Who cares?
"The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specifications define a registry service for Web services and for other electronic and non-electronic services. A UDDI registry service is a Web service that manages information about service providers, service implementations, and service metadata. Service providers can use UDDI to advertise the services they offer. Service consumers can use UDDI to discover services that suit their requirements and to obtain the service metadata needed to consume those services."
In my opinion, UDDI is either pointless (mostly) or ahead of its time. The one thing I can tell you is that its time is not now; just like it wasn't a few years ago when UDDI first came out. Everyone was touting UDDI as the great panacea for how enterprises and organizations will automatically publish and discover one anothers web services. I just don't think that is realistic. Lets take the enterprise example. Most groups develop apps for their use only; they don't develop interoperable apps. And if they did and there was another group that was interested in using their APIs, they wouldn't look them up in some directory, they'd go directly to the source. Even if you did want a listing of all the public web services in an org, you could put up a simple web page. I don't see the demand being strong enough to warrant a separate infrastructure. The other major problem with sharing anything within an enterprise is that when the owners of the components change something, they don't want to notify everyone that is using their component so they usually don't, and things break (hence one of the major reasons people don't like to share). And don't tell me versioning solves the problem because it doesn't.
The reason I said it could be ahead of its time is because really, UDDI should be the solution. If enterprises were more organized about development, UDDI could help solve the sharing problem. So in cases where you have groups within an enterprise that are highly motivated to share or multiple external organizations that are highly motivated to share, UDDI *might* be a good way to track the available web services. I'd love to see some non-trival examples of how UDDI worked well. The "Discovery" part of UDDI I really don't get and don't see a practical use for.
More open standards or not, my crystal ball says I'll be saying I told you so about UDDI in another 3 years. That's not to say there won't be some pockets of implementations, but I'm talking on a large-scale, I can't see it happening. And this is to say nothing of the underlying technology behind UDDI. This is more of a people and process issue. If you think I'm way off base, I'd love to here from you, shoot me an email.
