IAM Products in Different Market Segments

Access Management	Entitlements / Risk	Governance	Software as a Service	Social Media	Identity Management	Directories	Access Gateway	SAML
CAS                                OpenAM OpenSSO Oracle Access Manager Novell IAM CA Siteminder NetIQ IBM Tivoli Microsoft Forefront Asimba Intel SSO Symantec O3 Amazon IAM Atlassian Crowd Simplified RSA SAP IDM	OpenAM Oracle Adaptive Access Manager                            Novell Aveska Courion Sailpoint Cyber Ark	Sailpoint Oracle Role Manager            Oracle Identity Analytics Courion	Simplified               Fischer PingIdentity Ubilogin eIDM RM5 IDPee RSA OneLogin	JanRain Gigya Account Chooser	Syncope Idm     Midpoint OpenIAM OpenIDM Quest One WBSAgnito DirX Courion Salepoint Triplesec OneLogin SAP IDM Novell Hitachi Microsoft Siemens Beta Systems Avatier Omada BMC Evidian Voelcker Informatik	Oracle Virtual     Directory UnboundID	OpenAM Identity Gateway Microsoft UAG SAPGUI Nevis Oracle ESSO Imprivata	Shiboleth SimpleSAMLphp Microsoft ADFS Oracle Federation Manager eIDP

This is not meant to be a definitive list. Just a list a started awhile ago to keep track of the major players in the market. If I have missed any, leave a comment and let me know.

OpenAM 2nd Factor Modules

Recently do to moving on from Suncorp and moving to London to find contract work here, I have decided to continue experimenting with 2nd factor authentication i.e tokens and sms.
About a year ago at Suncorp we used to get what they like to call Google time which was two hours every tuesday and thursday morning to work on something that would help Suncorp or just use the time for development. I originally started using this time to look into Haptics Design, which interested me, even bough a device that I could experiment with. This was fun and helped learn a specific programming language of which I don't recall. Anyway as I was in the AIM team or Access & Identity Management team, I started picking up more and more, and interest in second factor authentication was born. Another team mate at the time bought and was experimenting with smart cards, so I looked up what could be done with OpenSSO, and found a cool module to do with finger print scanning, which to me sounded really cool. So I ordered a SecuGen Hamster IV, as the module and testing that securegen and sun had done was using that model, so thought best to keep to what was tested.
Will continue this later, must run to an appointment. :)

New app for all platforms

So about a week ago I started developing a mixing app, mainly cos thought it would be cool, develop my skills a little, and cos house mate has been right into it lately.

Previously I had made apps with Rhomobile, and liked what it had to offer, particularly recently where corporations can create their own application store and deploy to mobile devices, it shows they are thinking about the corporate arena and try to fill a gap.

Then I found Titanium Appcelerator, which I used to make a basic app, which was nice as it had more for different platforms.

For this app I dont know what to write in, as I found another couple of frameworks, PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/), Ansca Mobile/Corona (http://www.anscamobile.com/). I think I will settle with Titanium as it was very friendly to use and they seem to have a lot of backing recently from some big players, which has led them to offer more platforms and more capabilities in their API's.

Upgrade MacBook Harddrive

So about a week ago I thought my mac hard drive was failing, in saying that I had run it through the verify disk in Disk Utility and it said it was corrupted, so it could not repair it. Then I updated the software on it and I think that ruined some of the permissions on the drive, so I could no longer start it up, winner...that was some sweet sarcasm. So I decided I would try and upgrade the hard drive as it was long over due and hope that my curse of tinkering with computers and breaking them had gone away.

Bought a new Hitachi 500GB drive from MSY for $65 which I thought was pretty good, got a crappy case as well, to put the old one in once I fixed it and while backing up it up onto the new hard drive. So I followed the instructions here -> http://www.macinstruct.com/node/130
I thought this was pretty comprehensive, even went out a got myself a solid screw driver set which included the hex and T8 screw driver pieces which may or may not come in handy in the future.

So did all that put it back together then it wouldn't turn back on, checked the battery, the power chord, the RAM, the hard drive and everything. Read so many blogs and troubleshooting sites to learn what was wrong, as I am convinced that taking it to a mac shop and getting some nerd to fix it, is a waste of money when I can learn something out of this, even if it is not to mess with hardware I know nothing about.

So in my research a found a way to repair the hard drive over the network with a leopard install disc and a got my leopard disc back recently, so I was majorly bummed about this recent discovery since this would of been way less painful. Oh yeh for those of you who are asking why not just boot from cd/dvd, well captain obvious when I bought the mac of someone who was looking to get rid of it before escaping overseas in a late night deal, sounds a bit dodgy I know, anyway back to the point, that it came with an external dvd drive. Yep how prehistoric of me, and the thing is massive like the size of a tablet or an e pc massive.

So at the moment I have my mac hard drive plugged into my windows pc, as well as the new hard drive. I backed the mac hard drive onto the new hd and the plan is to install snow leopard or lion os x when it comes out on the hd. I am also told by a work colleague that he had the same problem and he was going to throw his Mac out one day and decided to turn it on, and it miraculously worked, so I am hoping for the same fortune except in less time. Fingers crossed.

In the mean time I have run up a virtual machine with linux on it, to do mobile application development with Titanium appcelerator (http://www.appcelerator.com/), should all definitely go check it out, well worth it. As windows sucks for this and anything else you want to do, except maybe writing letters with word and browsing the interwebz.

Taking csv turning it into xml with muenchian grouping

This task was a bit bigger than I anticipated when I offered to help a friend out with this.

First off a mate and I did the solution manually by importing the csv file into a access database then exporting it out to xml. From there the solution involved putting the xml onto a sharepoint site so it could be nicely presented and rendered with our xslt presentation file. This didn't deal with the fact that there was a lot of duplication and there needed to be some sort of grouping in the xml, as since the version of sharepoint we were working with was only capable of handling xslt 1.0 there was another set of challenges on our hands.

Mate has some experience in xslt and has added some elegant jquery into the mix as well, which makes for a very nice looking page.

Back to automating the csv to xml conversion. First I wrote a basic script to open up an access database then I created a form with three buttons on it, eventually these were automated as click events but first we had to write the code.

The first button was the import, which imported the csv file which was saved to a document store in sharepoint. Once that was retrieved it was written to a table, this was helped out with a schema file of what the headers names are and how to import the file i.e. with indexing, headers, table name etc. The second button was the exporting of the data, this was easy enough as their is an ExportXML function in vba with parameters this was fairly easy. I could of put the third button into the functionality of the second export button, but the ExportXML looks like it can accommodate the use of a transform method, but upon using this and searching the net did not find anyone who had successfully utilized this method to date. So the third button is the grouping or transforming the xml file and writing it back to the sharepoint document store so it can be rendered by the xslt file in sharepoint. You may ask why I didn't put the two xslt files together, well I tried this, but there was too much functionality already in the final xslt file, and it felt like the final xslt was more for presentation whereas the grouping should be done before it gets to this stage. So the third button imports the xml that the second button created and does a transform method using muenchian grouping, then writes this back to original xml stored in sharepoint.

Mobile Drupal

So lately I have been playing around with Drupal, I would consider myself a beginner in this area, although do have a bit of experience in Joomla. The particular area that I was interested in is Mobile as I have made a few iphone applications of late and wanted to delve more into web apps and their integration into different systems.

I have been also closely following jquery mobile in its alpha releases, so I decided I would see what has been done in this area, turns out not too much, although the necessary requirements in order for jquery mobile to work as a theme are getting closer with the jquery 1.4.4 now in the core for drupal 7.

I have run up a local install of drupal 7, and the only module that works in this area is mobile tools, which is a third party module that does the device detection which is enough to get started and do some programming and testing. Will will go about this in an agile manner, of course and prove that this will works then iteratively do some development around the different functionalities on the different platforms and using different themes based on user agents. I am hopeing that the Mobile Plugin & WURFL modules for drupal get updated somewhere along the line so we can use these modules functionality, as it is used in this space to detect the capabilities of the mobile/tablet or browser you are using, based on this we can use a different theme to offer up the best useability for the consumer. While the majority of users are on newer smartphones—iOS, Android, BlackBerry 5+ and WebOS are the major platform players, I see a consistent flow of people still using all sorts of older devices. For older phones it can be dangerous to throw it the same content and layout as the new smarter phones and can often lead to disaster, and can be especially perilous to assume any sort of meaningful JavaScript or advanced CSS support. That puts us in the best position to make these decisions with modules and themeing.

Another thing that sometimes needs to be taken into consideration is the need not just to provide adapted content to a given device class, but in fact to provide different content altogether. Due to the ill behaving way in which some browsers on some devices seem to work. We will leave out names here.

So back to some development