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.
My talk was about a way how to construct a complete open source IAM solution without a vendor lock in. First of all I have described why we need a “complete solution” and not just LDAP. While this motivation is quite clear for veteran IAM practitioners, it is still not a common knowledge. I have described the idea of “ecosystem” that can be a platform for open source companies to cooperate.
Even though the formal part of the ecosystem is still forming, the technology works today. Right now. Katka Valalikova demonstrated that right away with a live demo of midPoint and OpenLDAP. So, we are doing it differently than most of the commercial world: we have working technology before we start selling it.
Perhaps the most important take away for me is the overview of what other people are doing. And this is really an excellent news for midPoint. It looks like midPoint is far ahead of all other related presented activities when it comes to provisioning and synchronization. The other presented projects were interesting in their own right. But it looks like there are only very few solutions for consistency of directory service content with the outside world. Except for systems such as midPoint. There were also many interesting discussions about midPoint after my talk. I take that as a confirmation that we have made good choices and midPoint is going in the right direction.
So, see you in 2017 at the next LDAPcon.