Common Identity

I do a lot of research to keep up with the goings on in the Identity Management world. A lot of it is based on the goings on with SAP NetWeaver Identity Management, monitoring SDN, and the new documents that can be found on the main NW IDM page.

However there is a lot that goes on in the overall study of Identity Management.  I found Dave Kearns article from Network world to be very interesting and informative, and was sad to see it end.  Unfortunately many of the best sources for overall IdM information come from the various consulting groups, which require subscriptions.

There are, however several good blogs that one can find out there.  In particular I like to follow Matt Flynn, Jackson Shaw, Dave Kearns new blog, and Nat Sakamura.

There is also of course, the Planet Identity blog, which I think is one of the best overall sites that monitors IdM related information.

However, one source that always seems to teach me something new all the time is the Identity Commons website and mailing list. These folks don't just talk about user provisioning or access control or authentication or single sign-on or anything so simple. These  folks talk about how all of these things come together. Not just Identity Management, but the Management of Identity, on line, off line, between the lines and every other which way. I don't often participate in the discussions, but I always learn something from them and they have changed the way I approach the discipline of Identity Management.

For instance, a recent discussion about the use of various types of encryption and security turned into a whole discussion about the nature of Identity and what is required to track how Identities prove themselves between Relying Parties and that before we can worry about security we need to consider the overall model that Identities use to relate to each other and transact with various organizations (Relying Parties)

One of the posts pointed to a paper that starts to describe the terminology of how this all works. It's some fascinating reading that I think will again change the way I view identities as they relate to the various simple tasks of user provisioning, access control and authentication.

BTW, you might have noticed that the blog has gone through some formatting changes to take advantage of some of Blogger's latest advances.  Due to this I lost some of the gadgets and the blogroll.  I'll be getting them back up again as soon as I can.