review

2012 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

But before diving in the details of the blog itself, I’d like to do a short personal and professional review of 2012.

2012 has been an amazing year. We’ve grown ForgeRock at an incredible pace, doubling the staff, globally as well as in France. We’ve moved to new offices, with some extra space to welcome additional stars to our band (yes, we’re still hiring and looking for developers with excellent Java programming skills). We’ve made available 3 releases of OpenDJ, 3 of OpenIDM and 1 major release of OpenAM. However we missed our target of releasing OpenDJ 2.5. With the growth of the team and the company, we’ve made the OpenDJ release more ambitious than originally planned, adding a REST/Json to LDAP service, to facilitate the development of applications that need to access the data. All of it should be available in the coming months.

Blogging wise, I’m satisfied with the ratio of articles published until July, then the workload has impacted my ability to write as often as I would like… Part of the new year resolutions is to resume posting here at a regular pace, similar or better than in 2012. I hope you will enjoy reading and joining the discussion…

Now with the annual report :

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 34,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

OpenAM – The Book

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For many years, I’ve been working in collaboration with the Sun access management product team,  as it started working on the Directory Server Access Management Edition (DSAME) product that years later became Sun Access Manager and OpenSSO. And now that I’m at ForgeRock, I have the pleasure to keep working with some members of that team, on OpenAM, the continuation of the OpenSSO open source project.

My knowledge of the product is rather shallow as I’ve worked on several case studies or issues related to customers and LDAP directory servers, but I never had a chance to deploy a service for production use or even extensive testing.

So when I learnt that Packt Publishing was releasing a book on “OpenAM”, writen by Indira Thangasamy, an ex-colleague of mine and manager of the Quality Assurance team, I asked if I could get a copy for review, which Packt kindly agreed to.

I haven’t finished the book yet, as it’s over 250 pages of content, covering all aspects of the OpenAM software, from its history, its components and services, to its integration with Google Apps or SalesForce… But from what I’ve read (about 2/3 of the book), I can say that the book is easy to read and well organized. It helps a beginner to grasp the concepts and starts using the product, thanks to the detailed explanations and diagrams. As the chapters advance and dive into specific technical areas, Indira uses real-world examples and simple code or commands, followed by detailed description to illustrate what OpenAM does or does not, giving a comprehensive picture of the fully featured product.

Some of the features of OpenAM are not covered in the book, like Federation or the most recent Entitlement Services or Secure Token Services. I hope they will be covered in a revised edition or may be another book, as these features are becoming more used and important to enterprise security and access management.

In summary, if you’re about to, or have just started to engage on a project with OpenAM, this book will help you understand the technology and ease your ramping up. But even for the more experienced users of OpenAM, the book contains full of details, tips and example that will save you time and make you more efficient.

You can find the book on Pack-Publishing web site or Amazon.