Microsoft's Identity Vison and Strategy

Microsoft presented their vision and strategy today here at Gartner. They managed to bring up a customer (NewEgg.com) to talk about what they've done with Microsoft's Identity Lifecycle Manager product. Always good to have a customer talk about their experience! (see notes at the bottom of this post)

I thought it was funny that the presenter mentioned that too many people didn't know about Microsoft's fine certificate (X.509) server that is built into the server platform. I agree, it is a great solution and people don't know about it. With all the push around security you'd think they might trumpet this a bit more.

I blogged about this in the past but again noticed that they don't mention BizTalk server in their architecture slides even though BizTalk has an enterprise single sign-on service built into it along with other identity-based services. I'm more surprised that BizTalk is not mentioned because both BizTalk and the other IDM-related technologies all come under the same vice-president at Microsoft (Robert Wahbe).

They're still saying that ILM "2" and ADFS "2" will be released in 2H08. ILM "3" was mentioned for the first time (at least to me) as being released 18 months after ILM "2" and it will be focused around integration of all the components into a single offering - so I guess that's sometime around 2010 or 2011?

One happy thing was that I didn't see any of the slides I had authored while I was at Microsoft being used in this presentation!

NewEgg presentation

NewEgg's drivers were regulatory compliance, management of user entitlements and secure access to the network. They user Active Directory as their core identity repository so going with Microsoft certainly made sense especially when you add in the fact that their collaboraton platform is Exchange 2003. Interesting that NewEgg is using Remedy for their workflow and trouble tickets. They integrated with Remedy over web services. They deployed the system in 180 hours - so less than two months - that's really awesome especially when you consider that they needed to integrate SAP and they had no common attributes across the various systems.

As a next step NewEgg did mention that they might use CardSpace for external authentication to their e-commerce site!

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