Author: Radovan Semancik

From Waveset to midPoint, Part 1

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

Back in 2000s the Sun Identity Manager was the king. It was the best IDM product pursuant to Gartner. It had a good market share. And according to my experience it was actually the only practical IDM system on the market. Sun Identity Manager is now dead. It died in 2010 when Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle. Sun IDM was renamed to Oracle Waveset and the development of the product has been immediately stopped. But Sun IDM is a tough one. Even though it was killed 6 years ago it still survives in a creepy half-life form to this day. Oracle obviously tried to migrate all the Sun IDM installations to Oracle Identity Manager. But many customers refused to migrate. We can only speculate about the reasons, although anyone that had any hands-on experience with Oracle IDM will certainly have an opinion about that. Anyway, the future was not entirely bright for those who still maintain Sun IDM installation. But now there is a new hope. […]

MidPoint 3.4 (Heisenberg) Released

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

MidPoint 3.4 code-named “Heisenberg” was released a few days ago. This is the sixteenth midPoint release since the project started all these long years ago. MidPoint went a very long way since then.

The Heisenberg release is the best midPoint release yet. We have finished access certification functionality, which makes midPoint the very first open source product to enter the identity governance and compliance playing field. We have also improved midPoint internals to better handle inconsistencies of resource data and we have also made many small internal improvements to increase robustness. This was one of the inspirations for the code-name. Similarly to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle midPoint accepts that there is a degree of uncertainty when it comes to processing of the identity data. It may not be practically possible to always base the decisions on authoritative data. Practical identity management system needs to accept that the identity data are always in a state of flux – and midPoint does just that. And it manages the data reliably even in situations where other systems fail miserably. […]

There is No Security without Identity Management

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

It isn’t. That’s how it is. Why? Take any study describing potential information security threats. What do you see among the top threats there? Take another study. What do you see there? Yes. That’s the one. It is consistently marked as one of the most serious threats in vast majority of studies published for (at least) last couple of decades. Yet it looks like nobody really knows what to do about this threat. So, who is this supervillain? He’s right under your nose. It is the insider. […]

Test-Driven Bugfixing

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

Test-Driven Development (TDD) tells us to write the tests first and only then develop the code. It may seem like a good idea. Like a way how to force lazy developers to write tests. How to make sure that the code is good and does what it should do. But there’s the problem. If you are doing something new, something innovative, how the hell are you supposed to know what the code should do? […]

OpenLDAP Management: slapdconf

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

I like OpenLDAP. OpenLDAP server is famous for its speed and good open source character. But it is really infamous for ease of management. Or rather a lack of anything that could be called “easy” when it comes to managing OpenLDAP. Managing OpenLDAP content is not that difficult. For manual management there is excellent Apache Read more about OpenLDAP Management: slapdconf[…]

Smart Match

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

In identity management there is a class of petty issues that appear and re-appear all the time. Even though these issues are easy to understand, they are tricky to completely eliminate and they often have very nasty consequences. These seemingly unimportant issues frequently result in nights spent resolving a total breakdown of IDM system. What is this devil that kills sleep and keeps engineers away from the families? It is the daemon of case insensitivity and his friends. […]

Access Certification in midPoint

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

Identity Management (IDM) systems usually provide quite a broad mix of features. But there is one thing that no other system can do: management of access rights. No other system comes even close, even if they often pretend to do so. Access rights, privileges, role assignments, authorities, authorizations … whatever these things are called they need to be managed. They need to be assigned to the right people in the right systems at the right time. And that is no easy task. […]

LDAPcon 2015 Is Over

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

The LDAP conference was held in Edinburgh this year. And it was fascinating.

It was my first time that I have visited Scotland. Despite the infamous weather conditions it was a very pleasant experience. Edinburgh is a really impressive city. And Scotland has much to offer in a form of food and drinks that pretty much compensate the weather.

It was also my first time at LDAPcon. And now I pity that I’ve missed the previous conferences. I have decided that I will not repeat that mistake ever again. The conference size is just right: enough people to make it interesting and not too many to make it a crowded place. There were LDAP hardcore topics, engineering topics, standards talks and even an excursion to digital humanities and a violin performance. Overall it was a very interesting mix.
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Open Source Identity Ecosystem Idea

Posted on by Radovan Semancik

A significant part of open source software is developed by small independent companies. Such companies have small and highly motivated teams that are incredibly efficient. The resulting software is often much better than comparable software created by big software vendors. Especially in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) field there are open source products that Read more about Open Source Identity Ecosystem Idea[…]