Sunday, January 27, 2008
Links for 2007-01-27
It is interesting to see how a thread on how identity provisioning tools and their lack of true interoperability with Active Directory gets twisted into a discussion on the merits of OpenLDAP. What is interesting is that the comparison is solely technical and doesn't provide any rationale related to how much it would cost to maintain OpenLDAP vs ADAM. You will also notice mention of one and only one Fortune enterprise that uses it as their primary directory service. Of course, the mentioned company is in the consulting business so this isn't surprising. Maybe the mention of a bank or retailer in the Fortune ranks is in order. I suspect the economics nor the customer base simply aren't their...
One aspect of using biometrics that is rarely mentioned is that it could leak medical information. For example, a scan of one's fingerprint may show that James Robertson has several genetic defects he doesn't want others to know about. Likewise, a retinal scan may show that Robert McIlree did inhale explaining the reason for love of heavyweight processes. Turning your identity management architecture into something that could put you out of compliance with HIPAA needs to be carefully thought about. I suspect though that if it is written in SmallTalk and has lots of ceremonial heavyweight process then James and Robert won't mind.
Hopefully folks will check out Mike Walker's presentation and share their thoughts afterwards in the blogosphere.
Good to see that others are making a difference to end poverty.
This posting is intriguing and explains creating a service in Documentum. One should ask themselves whether a consumer of a service should be receiving Java exceptions. The principle that a service consumer shouldn't know what language a service provider is written in is violated. Likewise, the notion of authorizing the consumer being a battle is equally intriguing. I would think there is a way to tell the service provider which service consumers are allowed to invoke it? I assume that Craig Randall will be fixing this in the next release?
