On the first week of May, I was in Munich for the European Identity Conference hosted by Kuppinger-Cole.

This was my first participation and I was delighted to meet with several of the experts in the area as well as some OpenDS customers or users, whom I’ve mostly "known" only through blogs or emails. I had discussions with Kim Cameron, Jackson Shaw and James McGovern. We shared tea with Felix Gaehtgens and Prateek Mishra. The conference was also the opportunity to talk with and listen to some of my Sun colleagues that I don’t get to see often like Fulup Ar Foll and Eve Maler. I must say that both of them did pretty interesting presentations.

Eve’s keynote on the first day of the conference brought the case for "permissioned data sharing" and was very well argued. It was the first time that I heard about User Centric identity and VRM tied together and even with a proposed solution.

On Wednesday, Fulup did a very thought provocative (and fast forward) presentation about Digital Identity in the cloud, where he explained the identity management concepts are inherited from a centralized vision of the world and they would not fit well with the cloud, nor scale to the internet. He proposes to look at how mobile operators are solving massive identity scale and to leverage existing SAML2 and Liberty defined services to build the "lazy" identity architecture.

On Thursday I was to take part of a panel discussion on the subject of "The Identity Bus" or the future of Directory Services (should I say Identity Services ?), moderated by Felix Gaehtgens. The panel was an opportunity to see again Steve Shoaff, CEO of Unboundid but previously my manager, and to meet both Dale Olds of Novell and Prateek Mishra of Oracle. I don’t know if we’ve been able to give a good idea of what this "Identity Bus" would look like, but it’s definitely "something" in between applications and the data layer, and will probably use a set of protocols like SAML2 and XACML. After the panel, James McGovern asked me when OpenDS will support IGF and CARML. Since both are abstractions and APIs for applications to express their need in term of identity related data, I don’t think they are appropriate for an LDAPv3 directory server. But I do see a layer on top of Virtual Directories or Directories that is able to consume those and translate them into appropriate functions.

Right after that Panel, Mark Craig was taking part on a panel discussion on Virtual Directories, along with Sampo Kellomäki of Symlabs, Michel Prompt of Radiant Logic and Keith Grayson of SAP.

On the Tuesday, Pat Patterson and Daniel Raskin hosted the second OpenSSO Community Day, and it was a great success, with over 50 attendees, a day packed of presentations with a very good balance of users and deployers talks vs Sun employees’ talks.

Like in New-York, I talked about OpenDS, its goals and roadmap and why it’s the perfect companion to OpenSSO as the Users identity store. Most of the presentations from the OpenSSO Community Day have been posted on the event wiki page. And if you could not make it to New-York or Munich, we’re having a 3rd OpenSSO / OpenDS / Identity Connectors Community Day in San Francisco on Sunday May 31st at the Moscone center, starting at 1pm. The event is free, but please RSVP. And I hope to see you there.

And congratulations to Pat, Daniel and the whole OpenSSO team, for the Fedlet, winner of the "Best Innovation Award".

Overall, I found the conference really good and interesting and it helped me to put back the work we’re doing in the Directory Services engineering team, in the larger picture of Identity management.

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