Last week, ForgeRockhosted the London edition of the Identity Summit 2015. It was a great event, very successful with over 200 attendees to discuss identity, digital transformation and IoT.
My coworker Markus has published a detailed recap of the Summit, so I leave you with my usual picture gallery. Enjoy !
There will be two other Identity Summits in November this year. One in Amsterdam on November 5, one in Düsseldorf on November 12. If you haven’t registered yet, it’s still time !
A few years ago I had the pleasure to work with Rajesh Rajasekharan at Sun. He was an efficient trainer on Sun products and especially on Sun Directory Server. He recently joined ForgeRock and has started a series of blog posts and screen-casts on ForgeRock products and especially OpenDJ, but not only !
If you are getting started with the products or want to see demos of them, there’s no better place than to be on the “Learning Curve”
Meet the Security and Identity rockstars and thought leaders at The Identity Summit, May 27-29th 2015 !
In addition to the two full days of sessions, this year at The Identity Summit, all ForgeRock customers are invited to participate in a pre-event community day where you will be able to interact with ForgeRock product development and other customers.
The event will take place at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay, California.
Register today. Sign-up for the customer user group is part of The Identity Summit registration process. Make sure to add the Customer User Group as an “Additional Item” before submitting your information.
The call for speakers is opened until April 13th.
Last week at the nice Powerscourt Estate, outside Dublin, Ireland, ForgeRock hosted the European Identity Relationship Management Summit, attended by over 200 partners, customers, prospects, users of ForgeRock technologies. What a great European IRMSummit it was !
If you haven’t been able to attend, here’s some highlights:
I heard many talks and discussions about Identity being the cornerstone in the digital transformation of enterprises and organizations. It shifting identity projects from a cost center to revenue generators.
There was lots of focus on consumer identity and access management, with some perspectives on current identity standards and what is going to be needed from the IRM solutions. We’ve also heard from security and analytics vendors, demonstrating how ForgeRock’s Open Identity Stack can be combined with the network security layer or with analytics tools to increase security and context awareness when controlling access.
User Managed Access is getting more and more real, as the specifications are getting close to be finalised and ForgeRock announced the OpenUMA initiative for foster ideas and code around it. See forgerock.org/openuma.
Many talks about Internet of Things and especially demonstration around defining the relationship between a Thing and a User, securing the access to the data produced by the Thing. We’ve seen a door lock being unlocked with a NFC enabled mobile phone, by provisioning over the air the appropriate credentials, a smart coffee machine able to identify the coffee type and the user, pushing the data to a web service, and asking the user for consent to share. There’s a common understanding that all the things will have identities and relations with other identities.
There were several interesting discussions and presentations about Digital Citizens, illustrated by reports from deployments in Norway, Switzerland, Nigeria, and the European Commission cross-border authentication initiatives STORK and eIDAS…
Half a day was dedicated to ForgeRock products, with introductory trainings, demonstrations of coming features in OpenAM, OpenDJ, OpenIDM and OpenIG. During the Wednesday afternoon, I did 2 presentations on OpenIG, demonstrating the ease of integration of OAuth2.0 and OpenID Connect to protect applications and APIs, and on OpenDJ, demonstrating the flexibility and power of the REST to LDAP interface.
All presentations and materials are available online as pdf and now as videos on the ForgeRock’s YouTube page. You can also find here a short summary of the Summit in a video produced by Markus.
The summit wouldn’t be such a great conference if there was no plan for social interactions and fun. This year we had a nice dinner in the Powerscourt house (aka the Castle) followed by live music in the pub. The band was great, but became even better when Joni and Eve joined them for a few songs, for the great pleasure of all the guests.
Of course, I have to admit that the best part of the IRM Summit in Ireland was the pints of Guinness !
To all attendees, thank you for your participation, the interesting discussions and the input to our products. I’m looking forward to see you again next year for the 2015 edition. Sláinte !
As usual, you can find the photos that I’ve taken at the Powerscourt Estate on Flickr. Feel free to copy for non commercial use, and if you do republish them, I would appreciate getting the credit for them.
[Updated on Nov 11] Added link to the highlight video produced by Markus
[Updated on Nov 13] Added link to the slideshare folder where all presentations have been published
[Updated on Nob 24] Added link to the all videos on ForgeRock’s YouTube page
There are conferences and there are Conferences. The Conferences are the ones that you remember, because they happened in unusual places, because they’ve had a different atmosphere, you’ve met lots of friendly and bright persons. They are the ones you leave with the satisfaction of having learned something, having received value, and you’re looking forward to come back next year.
The IRM Summit is one of these Conferences. The next European IRM Summit is taking place in November, 3 – 5, near Dublin, Ireland, at the Powerscourt Estate pictured here. It’s a 2 days event where you can learn and discuss about the Identity Relationship Management space, standards, platforms, solutions…There will be many presentations, demos, trainings, plenty of time for discussions and meetings, a free half day Kantara Initiative workshop around “Trusted IDentity Exchange (TIDX)”, and some fun. I can already hear the fiddle, the pipes, the harp and smell the Guinness ! And I hope the weather will let us enjoy the wonderful garden.
Check out the agenda and the list of speakers, and don’t wait until last minute to register. While there are hundreds of rooms available, they are still counted and limited. Last year’s summit was sold out !
I’m looking forward to see you in beautiful Ireland !
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve taken an additional responsibility at ForgeRock: Product Management for a new product finally named ForgeRock Open Identity Gateway (built from the OpenIG open source project).
OpenIG is not really a new project, as it’s been an optional module of OpenAM for the last 2 years. But with a new engineering team based in Grenoble, we’ve taken the project on a new trajectory and made a full product out of it.
OpenIG 3.0.0 was publicly released on August 11th and announced here and there. But as I was on holidays with the family, I had not written a blog post article about it.
So what is OpenIG and what’s new in the 3.0 release ?
OpenIG is a web and API access management solution that allows you to protect enterprise applications and APIs using open standards such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and SAMLv2.
Enhanced from the previous version are the Password Capture and Replay and SAMLv2 federation support features. But OpenIG 3.0 also brings several new features:
I’ve presented publicly the new product and features this week through a Webinar. The recording is now available, and so is the deck of slides that I’ve used.
You can download OpenIG 3.0 from ForgeRock.com, or if you would like to preview the enhancements that we’ve already started for the 3.1 release, get a nightly build from ForgeRock.org.
Play with it and let us know how it is working for you, either by email, using a blog post or writing an article on our wiki. I will be reviewing them, relaying and advertising your work. And I’m also preparing a surprise for the authors of the most outstanding use cases !
I’m looking forward to hear from you.
Since I’ve started working at ForgeRock, I’ve had hard times to explain to my non-technical relatives and friends, what we were building. But those days are over.
Thanks to our Marketing department, I can now refer them to our “ForgeRock Story” video :
Two weeks ago, the first IRM Summit took place in Phoenix AZ, at the amazing Arizona Biltmore. It was a great pleasure to meet with many friends and acquaintances, analysts and experts in the Identity space. Lots of conversations, ideas et food for thoughts !
If you haven’t been able to attend, or missed a session or two, you can watch the videos from the event : https://www.youtube.com/user/ForgeRock/videos
And as usual, I’ve made all the photos that I’ve taken during the event available online, including the ForgeRock Partner event that happened the day earlier.
I hope to see you this fall at the European IRM Summit, in Luton Hoo, UK (more information should be available soon on the IRM Summit site or ForgeRock.com)
Now that we have a new office in Grenoble, I can focus on the next big event : the IRM Summit starting on June 3rd, in Phoenix Arizona.
The summit agenda is amazing, and I’m really looking forward to meet the best industry experts, some of our partners, and some of our customers. If you haven’t registered yet, there might still be passes available. But don’t wait too much, it’s only a week away. See you in Phoenix !
I will be at the LavaJUG (Java User Group from Clermont-Ferrand, France) this Thursday from 19:00 to 21:00, presenting our experience with the OpenDJ project with building a highly scalable and high performance server in Java. The presentation is based on what I’ve already presented in a few JUG in France (AlpesJUG, MarsJUG, PoitouCharentesJUG,…) and Switzerland (JUG Lausanne), but has been updated with regards to GarbageFirst GC and the most recent HotSpot JVM.
And next week, from March Wednesday 27th to Friday 29th, you will find ForgeRock at the Devoxx France conference.
Come to our conference session about “Enterprise Security in a Cloudy and Mobile World” (the session is in French). The session is on Friday 29th, from 11:45 to 12:35, in Miles Davis room. Mark it on your calendar, and if you miss it, make sure you stop by our booth (B3) to say hello and talk with some of our engineers. We will also be present at the HackerGarten on Wednesday from 14:00 to 18:00, should you want to have fun with one of our open source projects : OpenAM, OpenDJ or OpenIDM.
This is a big milestone for ForgeRock and the OpenAM project, an open source WebSSO, Authentication, Authorization, Federation and Entitlements solution. After months of development (a few more than we anticipated), we’ve finally released OpenAM 10.0.0, a major version of the product.
OpenAM 10 brings a set of new features, including support for OAuth 2.0 client authentication, the ForgeRock Identity Gateway (built out of project OpenIG), enhanced SAML 2 identity provider capabilities, a new Risk Based Authentication module, … It also now relies on OpenDJ 2.4.5, the latest stable release of OpenDJ the open source LDAP directory server, and supports the internet-draft based LDAP password policy. You can find more details in the press announcement, or the product release notes. The documentation of the OpenAM 10 release can be read at http://docs.forgerock.org/en/index.html?product=openam&version=10.0.0.
The OpenAM 10 release owes a lot to the OpenAM community, for the issues raised : a total of 41 issues fixed in OpenAM 10 were raised by 26 different persons, and for the generous patches offered to fix over a dozen of these issues.
To each and every contributor : THANK YOU !
Another week goes by, and it’s time for another tab sweep.
Syntegrity Networks, one of our major partners in the US, has launched a campaign to encourage their customers to migrate from Sun Directory Server to OpenDJ.
Silverpeas, a Collaborative Platform, built as open source under the GNU Affero license by the eponym company, has been supporting LDAP for authentication and authorization for some time. The documentation for setting up the LDAP domain has been updated using OpenDJ as the recommended server.
ForgeRock OpenIDM capabilities are growing. After getting OpenIDM to work with Activity to provide workflows, the team posted a experimental tutorial to integrate Jasper with OpenIDM to produce nice reports. You can find more of these tutorials in the OpenIDM How To Collection.
I’ve been traveling a little bit last week, visiting a major customer in the UK (helping with their OpenDJ based directory service that has grown from 13 Millions entries to 17 Millions in a about 6 months).
Last week was also a busy week in term of news for ForgeRock. First, we’ve announced the release of OpenIDM 2.0, a major version of our real-time identity life-cycle management, provisioning and synchronization software product. OpenIDM 2.0 is a new release, but is already running in production at a few happy customers.
ForgeRock and Qubera Solutions have announced a partnership for the delivery of Standard-based Identity Services based on ForgeRock I3 Open Platform. Qubera Solutions offers workshops and migration tools to help former Sun Microsystems customers to move away legacy software solutions.
I’ve also came across a blog post from Martin Sandren, that positions ForgeRock as one of the challengers on the Identity and Access Management market. It’s an interesting reading and it looks like the previous announcement does start to address some of his concerns.
Martin was not the only one to talk about ForgeRock. Scott Mc Nealy has been nicely advertising about us on Twitter.
And finally, we’re expanding and therefore we’ve published a few job postings on our web site. I’m pretty confident that these are just a few to start with and we will have more, including some in our Grenoble Engineering Center.
Last month, just before the French national day, I was in Strasbourg to participate in the RMLL.
On the occasion, I did a presentation in the security track, about OpenAM Universal Gateway, another piece in the complex puzzle of Web Single Sign-On. The Universal Gateway solves an important problem in Access Management: allowing single sign-on for applications that are usually left out because they are based on legacy or non standard based technology.
The Universal Gateway comes from ApexIdentity, an acquisition that ForgeRock did in the spring. It’s been released in open source as part of the OpenAM source code repository.
The presentation I did was in French, and so are the slides.
You can find more about the Universal Gateway on ApexIdentity web site, and soon on OpenAM documentation.
The conference is happening once every other year, so with the plethora of conferences here and there, it’s quite easy to forget about it. But LDAPCon 2011, the 3rd international Conference on LDAP has been announced and will take place in October 10-11 2011 in Heidelberg, Germany.
LDAPCon brings together vendors, developers, active LDAP practitioners, system administrators to share their experiences about service operations, interoperability, application development and discuss LDAP at large, in a friendly and passionated athmosphere. It’s a unique occasion to discuss with the developers of most LDAP related projects, seed them with new ideas, learn the under-documented tips and tricks about your favorite server or library, or exchange with other users and system administrators about the best practices around LDAP directory services and applications.
A Call for Papers have been raised. You have up to July 8th 2011 to submit your talk. You can find all details, important dates or topic ideas on the LDAPCon CFP page.
Don’t miss the conference, it’s only happening every 2 years. I hope I’ll see you in Heidelberg.
Ludo Sketches 