Posted 11:23 AM (0) comments

Personal Directories

The Burton Group's Jamie Lewis is fascinated by Dan Bricklin's MetaSMB: The Self-Organizing, Loosely Coupled Directory (metaSMB=small- and medium-sized business metadata) as a model for a distributed directory system. This appears to be very much like my maunderings about the "personal directory" as well as Novell's proposal for the .DIR top-level domain (TLD). Loosely coupled, personal (where "personal" simply means one person or one organization) directories perhaps using SAML for security assertion (i.e., truthfulness) are an idea whose time is just about come.

Posted 11:15 AM (0) comments

"I'm from the government..."

Financial firms get new guidelines on customer IDs - Computerworld reports, as part of a story on CID requirements of the Patriot Act, that new Securities and Exchange Commission rules governing the logging and retention of electronic communications by financial services firms have gone into effect. These require exchange members, brokers and dealers to capture and maintain a log of all electronic communications for at least six years. This includes email and "instant messaging"! We might re-label this the "water cooler revival" act....

Posted 3:22 PM (0) comments

Tightly uncoupled?

Web Services guru Phil Wainwright at Loosley Coupled thinks that in the immiediate future UDDI finds a role after all as a locater of private services. And to show that non-directory folk still don't get it, he writes: "...as IBM Software's vice president of emerging technology Rod Smith points out, one of the advantages of UDDI's B2B origins is a built-in predilection for loosely coupled interactions that conventional directory services may not share."

Posted 4:06 PM (0) comments

AD and IDs

According to my Network World colleague John Fontana (Microsoft server to tackle ID mgmt.), Microsoft has found a new job for its metadirectory, which it will adapt to become the foundation for an eProvisioning service. My first question, though, is how effective will this be if Microsoft continues to ignore the existence of other directories and platforms?

Posted 3:47 PM (0) comments

OSS UDDI

Novell has released the Nsure UDDI Server Released as Open Source The open-source UDDI 2.0 registry built on Directory Services technology. While it supposedly runs best on eDirectory it will also supposedly run against any LDAP v3 server.