Well, my friends, it is time for me to say goodbye. It’s been a wonderful 5 years at Sun. As many probably suspected, I will not be joining the Oracle Identity team.

These past five years have been the best professional experiences in my life. I had a blast working with the Java Enterprise System team and Sun’s systems management team, but nothing beats my experience working with the most talented Identity Management team in the world. Oracle is inheriting THE BEST Identity products available and I wish them luck on their strategy and direction.

Although I’m very happy that this process has finally come to a close, I am sad to see Sun fading away. I believe the environment that Sun fostered was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I appreciate the experience and have tremendous gratitude for all that it offered me.

Since I host my own blog now, I will continue to blog here about everything identity. Also, If you want to keep in touch, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

I wanted to update you on the news last week about Pat Patterson (aka SuperPat) moving on from Sun and our search for a new community lead.
As you all now know, Pat has moved on from Sun and thus has stepped down as the OpenSSO community lead. I want to wish Pat the best of luck in his future endeavors. He is not only an icon among the OpenSSO world, but he is also a great friend. I jokingly told Pat on his last day that he is “now dead to me,” but the truth is I will miss him dearly and look forward to pestering him lots in the future.
That said, I am very happy to announce that our new OpenSSO community lead is Hubert Le Van Gong. Hubert has a long history with OpenSSO. He is an identity architect at Sun with strong expertise in IdM protocols as well as RESTful web services. He started working with OpenSSO in the context of interoperability with the Microsoft-backed web services stack. True to Sun’s tradition of eating its own dog food, he then helped deploy OpenSSO and its OpenID extension as an Identity Provider for Sun employees. More recently Hubert has been working on new OpenSSO extensions like OAuth and OpenID 2.0. Check out Hubert’s blog to read about OpenSSO community activity and feel free to ping him via IRC. His IRC handle is hubertlvg.
In addition to Hubert, you can always contact me directly at daniel.raskin@sun.com or Jamie Nelson, the Director of OpenSSO Engineering, at jamie.nelson@sun.com. We are also on IRC and our handles are draskin and jamiefnelson, respectively.
Please join me in welcoming Hubert to his new role and start pinging away with questions!

In our ever expanding effort to grow our open source identity community, Sun now has an open source initiative to support Sun Identity Manager. That’s right, you heard it. Sun Identity Manager (IDM) has moved closer to the world of open source by launching the Identity Connectors Project, a new open-source alternative to Identity Manager’s proprietary resource adapters.
The Identity Connector Project is an open source community focused solely on developing open source resource connectors to work with Sun Identity Manager. One of the biggest hurdles in the world of provisioning is keeping up with the endless cycle of new connectors needed to provision resources. The pipeline for creating new connectors is endless. The Identity Connectors Project eases this pain creating a strong community where Sun, system integrators, customers and even competitors can build open source connectors to work with Sun Identity Manager and other 3rd party products that choose to interoperate with the Identity Connector Framework.
Sign-up for the new project and begin contributing today!

As promised, Sun is proud to announce the release of OpenSSO Express Build 7. This is a supported release and the first of many Express Releases leading up to OpenSSO Enterprise 8.1.
As many of you already know, the moment we finish a feature we now test it and make it available via an Express Release, which occur every three months. Customers that subscribe to OpenSSO Enterprise get complete access to these builds with support and indemnification.
Below is a list of some of the major enhancements / features.
1. FEDERATION WITH GOOGLE APPS PREMIER
Google Apps Premier Customers can now download Sun OpenSSO to deploy rapid federated single sign-on to organizations that use Google Apps as their collaboration and messaging service. The OpenSSO solution allows organizations leveraging Google Apps to use enterprise logins to access Google Apps, providing increased user adoption, improved security and administration benefits.
2. ADDITIONAL CONTAINER SUPPORT
* GlassFish Prelude 3
* IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0
* Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 (10.3)
3. SUPPORT FOR OPENDS STANDARD EDITION
Customers can now download and deploy OpenDS Standard Edition as a user store with OpenSSO.
To read about all the new features and enhancements in OpenSSO Express 7 check out our Express 7 Release Notes.
Download OpenSSO Express 7 now.

I am very excited to announce that the OpenSSO Feature Release Schedule is now available on wiki.opensso.org. The coolest thing about this schedule is that we are releasing product every three months!!!! Every build listed in this schedule is also supported by Sun, so if you put it in to development or production you always have the option to buy an OpenSSO Enterprise license or subscription to receive support and indemnification. Pretty cool stuff! Check out the schedule by clicking the image below.