open source identity management

Penrose can provide an LDAP layer on top of a Crowd database, as well as implement a password decrypt/decode function, so that applications can authenticate using the same passwords that are stored in Crowd without duplicating user information. Detail instruction after the jump..

Penrose 1.2 is here.

The Safehaus Penrose team is proud to announce Penrose 1.2. Special thanks to Pete Rowley (FedoraDS) and Neil Wilson (OpenDS) and all the nice people who contributed to this release: Ricardo A. Gorosito, Michael Ramirez, Hubert Fongarnand, Rodrigo Kumpera, Richard Renomeron and many more.

Please see the release notes for complete detail.

Penrose 1.2 many fixes since 1.1:

• Significant performance improvements.
• Additional LDAP front-end: Sun OpenDS, FedoraDS and Apache Mina.
• Support of database-level join operation.
• Support of paged search result in LDAP adapter.
• Support of custom controls.
• Indexing Engine and JDBC Engine improvement
• Many other bug fixes!
• Many thanks to those who helped build and test this release!

Identity Wheel illustrates what are still missing in open source identity management landscape. Anyone is willing to lend a hand to fill up the pie ? Identity services slice is definitely heating up. How can we evenly distribute the open source developers to work on the less crowded pie slices ? For a start, you can join the conversation at safehaus.org

After the jump, read article by Michael Caton’s - “Virtual Directories Take Hold“.

I love 37signal products. I use BackpackIt to organize my personal tasks. I use Basecamp to manage my projects and clients. Recently, 37signal introduced Highrise, a simple contact sharing web-app. You can forward your e-mail conversations to Highrise and it will know how to append the conversations to the right contact. This is a great lead/sales tracking tool, in other words, salesforce.com killer!

Would it be nice if you can lookup Highrise contacts in your e-mail clients (Thunderbirds, Outlook Express, etc.) or address book? It turns out that there’s an ubiquitous way to look-up remote contacts on all of these clients. It is through directories/LDAP protocol.
Here is Apple Address Book directory configuration:

The combination of Highrise and Penrose allows users to lookup Highrise contacts thru LDAP. As you know, Penrose provides a light-weight LDAP service on top of identity silos, such as databases. The database to LDAP transformation is done in a real-time. No migration and synchronization is needed.
P.S: We have built a prototype for a telco environment. As you know, telco has the most stringent requirements, both from performance and scalability standpoints. So, Jason is you are reading this and interested in getting our help for Penrose implementation, give us a buzz. We’d love to work with you.

LDAP Studio is by far the best open source LDAP client implementation available. You can download it here. Credits goes to Stefan Seelmann, Pierre Arnauld Marcelot (we call him ‘pam’), Christie Koppelt and all of ApacheDS committers. I applaud these guys for yet again contributing a high quality software.

Just like Penrose Studio, LDAP Studio is based on Eclipse RCP PDE framework. It comes with two plugins: an LDAP browser and a schema editor. Both plugins can be installed into your Eclipse IDE by pointing it to the remote site  http://directory.apache.org/ldapstudio/update/

With NIS is being EOL’d by Sun, most organizations will want to migrate their NIS servers to LDAP-based directories. Organization who is still using Sun NIS will fail Sarbanes-Oxley audits. However, the Sun current migration process is fairly lengthy and complicated one. Penrose can simplify this process by providing an LDAP façade for the NIS backend servers. Its NIS adapter technology will facilitate an extended transition period by leveraging data in the NIS domains data stores. Its transformation, join and proxy engines will help address data migration concerns such as UIDs and GIDs conflicts (non unique across all of its NIS domains) and management of site local data. The advantage of this approach is that administrator can start moving pool of machines into the new LDAP system in a staggered manner with no or minimal downtime.

Thanks to Neil Wilson (a.k.a cn=Directory Manager) for his advise. We have completed OpenDS integration on Penrose in record time. Penrose can now leverage four LDAP listeners: ApacheDS (default), OpenLDAP, Fedora DS and OpenDS.

DoubleSlash, an Identity Management consultant, Klaus Moser, published an article with a title “Penrose - Virtual Directory 2.0“. It’s worth a read. (WARNING: it is written in German)