Oracle Identity Management vs. Oracle Identity and Access Management

Posted on Jan 12, 2012 in Industry Trends, News and Updates, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

Many of our customers get hung up on the terminology for Oracle’s Identity and Access Management offerings, and perhaps rightfully so. There are more names and acronyms given to these products as there are people implementing them.

Following is a quick breakdown of the latest version of both 1) Oracle Identity Management and 2) Oracle Identity and Access Management from the technical perspective of downloading and installing the products (as opposed to product packaging/licensing). When you speak with an identity management implementation partner like M&S Consulting, you will want to use the below terminology to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Oracle Identity Management 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0) – Released May 6, 2011

• Oracle Internet Directory 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Directory Integration Platform 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Virtual Directory 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Directory Services Manager 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Identity Federation 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)

Oracle Identity and Access Management (11.1.1.5.0) – Released May 23, 2011

• Oracle Identity Manager 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Identity Manager Connectors 11g
• Oracle Access Manager Server 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Access Manager WebGate 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Adaptive Access Manager 11 gR1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Security Token Service 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Entitlements Server 11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Entitlements Server Security Module11g R1 (11.1.1.5.0)
• Oracle Identity Navigator 11g R1(11.1.1.5.0)

Oracle Books – Packt Publishing

Posted on Sep 6, 2011 in Industry Trends, Offerings | 0 comments

Packt Publishing, the company that published the WebCenter Book that M&S Consulting’s E2.0 team co-authored, has just launched an Oracle focused version of its new online library platform: PacktLib.

Aimed at all Oracle professionals, the Oracle book library is a low-cost, cloud-based resource that you can access anywhere whether in the office, on the move, or at a client’s site.

• Access all Packt’s Oracle books (50+) for less than $120 per year! That’s just couple of bucks per book.
• Get hold of high value information on the Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware, Oracle Applications, and more.
• Read content on your PC, Laptop, iPad, or mobile device.
• Copy, Paste, Bookmark, and Print information – as needed.
• Get access to all the new Oracle books as they are published! There will be more than 20 in the next 12 months alone.

Click to see all Packt’s Oracle Books. Also, enjoy a special M&S Consulting discount (10% off) by entering the code: oraclib10 when you sign up to the Packt Oracle Book Library.

Oracle OpenWorld 2011 — Come See Us!

Posted on Jul 29, 2011 in Industry Trends, News and Updates, Offerings | 0 comments

We’ll head out to yet another Oracle OpenWorld even this year. Drop us a line and come see us October 2-6 in San Francisco!

If you haven’t already, click the below image to register!

As usual, it’s going to be fun…and if you haven’t already heard, this year’s Appreciation Event features Sting as well as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers!

Bigmon Cloud Monitoring Saved My Site

Posted on Jun 18, 2011 in Business Strategy, News and Updates, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

Over the years, the M&S Consulting site has grown quite a bit. We have hundreds of blog articles and have retired more pages of content than are currently active. By introducing Bigmon Cloud into our environment, we realized — to our surprise — that our site was one of the slower loading sites when compared to other sites we have built, either for internal project or customers.

By using Bigmon metrics reporting and trending, we were able to test mechanisms for speeding up the site and moving performance into a place we felt was acceptable. Then, we were able to set new thresholds in Bigmon to ensure that we are notified when/if the site begins to perform in a manner that is less than optimal. Following are some of the Bigmon charts you will see that drive home the success of our updates as well as the value of Bigmon Cloud. You will see that we were able to address the performance issues immediately and the results are trending in slices of 2 hours, 1 day, and 1 week. Results have been consistent.

Identity Management: From Oracle 10g to 11g – IdM, SSO, OAM

Posted on Apr 26, 2011 in Industry Trends, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

I have been running Oracle Identity Management 10g with heavy use of 10g SSO capabilities. Much of our web security architecture along with application authentication relies on this infrastructure. What do I do as development begins to shift from OracleAS to WebLogic, and our middleware stack goes from 10g to 11g? We will need to run 10g and 11g in production side-by-side for some period of time.

This is a question many of our customers are asking and it is understandable that there is confusion around this. Oracle hasn’t provided the clearest of answers, and in general, identity management initiatives are not for the faint of heart to tackle. The fact is that 11g identity management has begun a paradigm shift away from the 10g approach. The good news is that customers have options as they inevitably run 10g and 11g together in their environments since identity management solutions span across applications and nobody [I know of] decides to upgrade all of their enterprise applications at once.

In 11g, you have the option of integrating applications (i.e. ADF 11g applications) running on WebLogic with 10g SSO through identity asserters. This approach basically passes in header information to WebLogic that enables it to “trust” a user authenticated via 10g SSO much like it would trust AD or any other form of identity assertion. As you move to an 11g identity management stack, nowhere will you find 10g SSO as you know it. You will need to buy into the OAM (Oracle Access Manager) 11g model, which includes a robust enterprise access management approach in line with 11g applications that rely on J2EE security standards like JAAS.

Best CMS: WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal – What makes one a winner over the others?

Posted on Apr 22, 2011 in Case Studies, Industry Trends, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

I was recently asked [again] about what platform to choose for an open source web CMS. At the highest level, and to avoid considering too many variables that introduce confusion into a decision, my general feeling on this is to go with the technology that best balances the following (in order):

1. Community (users, third parties, and developers): size, enthusiasm, and proselytization
2. Technology: tech stack and solution architecture
3. Leaders: commitment, flexibility, release schedule

I feel the community size and enthusiasm is so important that I decided to chart out the general trends. Although we implement will all of these CMS’s successfully, we have been choosing WordPress over the others for a number of years on most CMS implementations. My own experience is that the WP community has been growing rapidly and gaining enthusiastic momentum. The below results prove it.

Overall, trends show popularity in WordPress far surpassing Joomla and Drupal over the years:

For the past year, we see WordPress in its own league of popularity:

Trends for the three solutions with the word “CMS” attached shows a slightly closer picture overall. I feel this is mainly because WordPress was initially marketed as a blogging platform. Though I’ve been using it as a CMS for quite some time, only more in the past year or two have people really embraced it as a powerful CMS:

However, when you look at the past year, again WordPress far surpasses the others:

Using these products for years, I have many insights and considerations that have yet to be put down in writing, but I hope the above provides you a little idea of one of the main variables we consider when selecting a solution for our customers.

Custom-Built Java vs. Open-Source Portal (like Liferay) – What Should I Do?

Posted on Feb 21, 2011 in Business Strategy, Industry Trends, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

You are not alone. Many organizations are going through the same analysis and process. There are many possible options/variables to consider, but “should I roll-my-own custom site vs. leverage [open-source] products?” is one of the most common questions to answer today when considering a new web project. Following is a quick list of reasons you might want to consider choosing one over the other.

Custom-Built Solution

• Complete Flexibility: Build a relevant solution without any, or many, compromises — whatever compromises you do make will likely be based on time and money as opposed to wrestling the wisdom of someone else’s architectural choices
• Smaller Footprint: Along the same lines, only write code and maintain what is vital to your specific needs

Liferay

• Why build that?: Liferay handles aspects of the implementation that you simply do not want to have to build and maintain on your own unless you have a compelling reason to do so
  • authentication options – pre-built integration with LDAP and other technologies like CAS
  • security – roles-based permissions model
  • technology architecture (db abstraction, UI design, templating, page structure, etc.) – Liferay has already thought through flexible approach
• Learning curve: though there is a learning curve to Liferay (or any other product), it you can actually find external resources who understand Liferay, but anyone outside the organization will need time to pick up on all the nuances of your custom code/architecture
• Still Custom: We have built enterprise web applications in portal environment where one would have to dig a bit to determine a portal framework was used. You can still build custom features and drop in standards-based portlets where you need in a solution like Liferay’s. Also, remember, you have access to the source code, unlike other products on the market.

Kerberos Module for Apache – mod_auth_kerb Download (mod auth kerb)

Posted on Feb 17, 2011 in Industry Trends, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

In case you are having trouble finding the Kerberos Module for Apache like some of our customers have, we have decided to host it on our website as well. With more organizations interested in securing their applications with native Windows authentication, this is becoming more and more popular.

We have been devising integrated Windows authentication identity management solutions with Apache for years, so we’re quite comfortable with the best ways to implement with this. Many large software vendors actually leverage this same approach in their enterprise identity management solutions. Feel free to download mod_auth_kerb using the below form.