Oracle Updates Identity Management Suite

Published: August 22, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Oracle last week announced a new release of its Identity Management product, a suite of tools for managing users' identities, and the security "backbone" of its next-generation Oracle Fusion architecture. With Identity Management 10g Release 3, the software giant has rolled out enhancements related to auditing and passwords and expanded its platform support, among other improvements.

Oracle's Identity Management product suite is a sprawling affair that spans many different products that offer a whole host of capabilities, including Web access control, identity administration, user provisioning, federated identity management, and directory services. These capabilities are offered through several components, including Oracle Identity Manager (formerly known as Oracle Xellerate Identity Provisioning), Access Manager (formerly known as COREid Access and Identity), Virtual Directory, Internet Directory Services, and Identity Federation (formerly known as COREid Federation).

With Identity Management 10g Release 3, the company has updated each of the suite's components. The Identity Manager component, for example, gains a new module for audit and compliance, an "attestation" framework, and improved reporting. The Access Manager product, which powers the suite's single-sign on (SSO) capabilities, gains "advanced password management capabilities," as well as support for additional authentication triggers and third-party platform certifications.

Meanwhile, the Virtual Directory component, which is designed to enable different LDAP-compatible directories and relational databases to work together, gains new audit and reporting features, as well as smooth installation when working with IBM Tivoli and Microsoft Active Directory products. Oracle's own LDAP offering, Internet Directory Services, which is based on the Oracle database, also gains better object identifier (OID) synchronization with Novell's eDirectory and the open source Open LDAP offering, as well as LDAP-based fan-out replication and tighter password integration with Active Directory.

The Identity Federation component of the suite, which Oracle curiously identifies as a stand-alone product, gains better support for security assertion markup language (SAML) 2.0 and WS-Federation.

Oracle also says it has expanded its platform support with 12 additional platforms; however, the company does not identify the new platforms supported, and a search of its Web site was not successful in turning up this information. In any event, users can rest assured that Identity Management is "hot plug" compatible with the bulk of its enterprise applications, including E-Business Suite, J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Siebel CRM applications, as well as with rival SAP's software.

Oracle Identity Management 10g Release 3 runs on Windows, Unix, and Linux, and is now available in 28 languages. For lots more information, try www.oracle.com/identity.