DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!
There’s a new pyramid scheme hitting the world of identity called entitlements management. It’s sprouted up as a new space and lots of vendors are selling standalone entitlement management solutions that customers purchase and deploy in to their environments. I just don’t get it! Web Access Management solutions were built to do this. Rather than create a completely separate solution to deploy and maintain in your environment why not leverage that?
So . . . This rant is aimed at telling you three things about Sun’s entitlement management plans.

1. We are in the process of expanding OpenSSO to handle Fine Grained Authorization / Entitlement Management out-of the box! We will NOT sell you another thing that you need to deploy in to your datacenter.

2. You will see this in OpenSSO Express by late Spring / Early Summer! Yep. This one is in the works and it’s going to be very cool. We have some slick ideas and this is going to be our next “fedlet.”

3. It will be all be open source! You heard that right. Everything we do will be available via the opensso community and free to use. If you are interested in contributing let us know.

Sun will be the ONLY provider to offer a single solution that not only does access controls, federation and secure web services, but also entitlement management. Stay tuned for more to come!!!!

Wajih Ahmed, a senior systems engineer and technical specialist at Sun, just published a nice article on the Sun Developer Network that explains how to use OpenSSO to federate with Google Apps. Take a read and give it a shot!

Why are these monkeys dancing? Because OPENSSO ENTERPRISE 8 is now available for download!!!! This is a groundbreaking release with tons of features. Check it out now and congratulations to the team for all the hard work!!!

While attending Gartner IAM 2008 in Orlando, don’t miss The Sun Microsystems Identity Party at the Gaylord Hotel’s Emerald Bay Presidential Suite Monday night. Spend time with your friends from Sun Microsystems while enjoying drinks, great food and killer music. Stop by our booth for more details on the presidential suite room number and the “secret code” to get in.