Wednesday, March 19, 2008
The Evolution of Directory Services
I like Marc Wilcox and his thoughtful posting on the evolution of directory services and had a few more questions of him.
1. Marc stated: I don't know how often I have to tell people this - but most Oracle products can connect to AD directly without additional licensing which begs first a refinement of the question of which Oracle products can connect to AD and ADAM using the LDAP protocol and more importantly since you said most which Oracle products currently cannot?
2. Marc stated: EUS does more than just authentication - it also handles mapping of directory schema to directory users and mapping of directory roles to LDAP groups but didn't address whether the functionality described should just be a characteristic of any product that is directory enabled. For example, if Documentum told us that they support LDAP, should we interpret this to mean that they only authenticate against it or should this mean that they can also handle mapping?
3. Marc stated: pretty much every one of the Global 1 Billion companies have additional user identity stores not stored in AD or even an LDAP server for that matter :) and described how a product could be a potential solution but didn't talk about any type of outreach to either these same global 1 billion companies nor the software vendors that haven't had the sense to buy the most wonderful books written by you. What is Oracle's obligation to help others write LDAP enabled software so that they don't require virtualization.
4. Can we agree that consolidation is a better enterprise strategy than virtualization?
| | View blog reactions1. Marc stated: I don't know how often I have to tell people this - but most Oracle products can connect to AD directly without additional licensing which begs first a refinement of the question of which Oracle products can connect to AD and ADAM using the LDAP protocol and more importantly since you said most which Oracle products currently cannot?
2. Marc stated: EUS does more than just authentication - it also handles mapping of directory schema to directory users and mapping of directory roles to LDAP groups but didn't address whether the functionality described should just be a characteristic of any product that is directory enabled. For example, if Documentum told us that they support LDAP, should we interpret this to mean that they only authenticate against it or should this mean that they can also handle mapping?
3. Marc stated: pretty much every one of the Global 1 Billion companies have additional user identity stores not stored in AD or even an LDAP server for that matter :) and described how a product could be a potential solution but didn't talk about any type of outreach to either these same global 1 billion companies nor the software vendors that haven't had the sense to buy the most wonderful books written by you. What is Oracle's obligation to help others write LDAP enabled software so that they don't require virtualization.
4. Can we agree that consolidation is a better enterprise strategy than virtualization?
