Are you going to the 2nd European Identity Conference?

I am! This event is being put on by the good people of Kuppinger-Cole and takes place April 22-25 in Munich, Germany. There a great line up of speakers including yours truly. The theme of the conference is "Thought Leadership & Best Practices in Identity Management". I have to say that there are a lot of thought leaders attending including...

• My old friend and colleague Kim Cameron from Microsoft
• Doc Searls editor of the Linux Journal and a Harvard Fellow
• Dave Kearns from Network World
• Andre Durand from Ping Identity
• Dale Olds from Novell
• ...and what looks like lots of customers including France Telecom, HypoVereinsbank, ING Bank, Volkswagen and many more

It's shaping up to be an awesome conference. I hope to see you there!!!

Technorati Tags:
Quest Software, identity management, Microsoft

Are you going to the SSO Summit?

If you don't know about the SSO Summit then check it out here: http://www.ssosummit.com/.

Quest Software is a sponsor of the show. It's being held in Keystone, Colorado on July 23-25. Ping Identity is the catalyst behind making the show happen.

See you there???

Technorati Tags:
Quest Software, identity management

Active Directory is the incumbent

Yes, Jeff Bohren is a convert. His post "The elephant in the room" hit home for me. Active Directory is the incumbent directory out there and as such needs to figure very centrally in any future "meta-directory" world. It's about time we, as an industry, gave it up for Microsoft.

Despite all of its flaws, Active Directory is the king. Jeff's advice is exactly what I have been preaching for a long time now:

I know this isn’t pleasant to hear, but AD is the incumbent. It’s nearly everywhere. It’s scalable to millions of users. The LDAP protocol is efficient and mature. It’s supported by countless applications. Before a customer considers displacing or adding another identity layer on top of AD they are going to need real cost savings or additional capabilities and order of magnitude over what they have now.

Let's all get with the program.

Technorati Tags:
Microsoft, Active Directory, identity management

Mr. LDAP at Microsoft now

A month or so ago I was presenting to a group of identity and access management folks over at Microsoft and one of the folks who attended the meeting was none other than Mark Wahl. I first met Mark back in my Zoomit days. I believe, at the time, Mark was with Innosoft which was later acquired by Sun. I'm proud of having my name attached to a few patents but Mark has his name attached to a number of RFCs related to LDAP: 2253, 2247 and let's not forget 2251 - the LDAP V3 RFC!

I have to admit I was surprised to see Mark at Microsoft (he's pictured above, on the right). He told me he had joined around Thanksgiving and he was working on protocols as part of the identity team. Of course, when I heard that my immediate question was:

So you're the guy I can talk to about when and how Microsoft is going to support XACML?

Unfortunately, Mark wasn't able to give me a clear answer to that question. Anyway, it's good to see a standards person at Microsoft. I hope you get to make an impact, Mark.

Technorati Tags:
XACML, LDAP, Microsoft