As with any packaged suite, finding the best Identity Management products for your enterprise is a not a trivial task. This is especially true when different products from different vendors, that accomplish different objectives or services have remarkably similar (and therefore confusing) naming conventions. To help layout the current Identity Management vendor / product landscape as we see it, we’ve put together the following matrix of products by vendors. Service Identity Governance User Life Cycle, Self-Service, Request / Role Based, Provisioning & Deprovisioning, Password Management, Attestation & Compliance / Separation of Duties Oracle Identity Manager IBM® Security Identity Manager CA … Read More
Bigmon Cloud Monitoring Saved My Site
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 … Read More
Custom-Built Java vs. Open-Source Portal (like Liferay) – What Should I Do?
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 … Read More
Oracle ECM vs UCM — What’s the difference?
I’m starting to see Oracle ECM get mixed with Oracle UCM more these days when people talk about Oracle’s Content Management offering(s). Sometimes I wonder if this kind of confusion isn’t premeditated by marketing managers, but that’s another story. So, here’s the scoop (and though I say this confidently, I find myself compelled to disclaim that this is the scoop as I understand it, and as Oracle is using these terms as of the date of publication). For starters: ECM stands for Enterprise Content Management UCM stands for Universal Content Management “Oracle Content Management” offerings are also referred to as … Read More
Liferay Intranet Portal with Google Charts Dashboard
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and finally got around to adding Google Charts into an enterprise intranet portal. We had five unique data points to display as key performance indicators (KPIs) for how the organization is performing. We have delivered a number of whizbang charting and dashboard capabilities and had a lot of fun with them over the years, but this time, we wanted a lightweight capability that generated images (no Flash and no JavaScript) so any old browser on any platform would render this area properly. We also didn’t want to introduce any extra file … Read More
WebLogic “SSO” Security – Authenticators and Asserters
As part of our Oracle Identity Management services, we are consistently configuring environments running WebLogic and integrating deeply with the WLS Security architecture. The following information from the Oracle documentation is a good description of how this is accomplished. It is referred to by Oracle as Perimeter Authentication. WebLogic Server is designed to extend the single sign-on concept all the way to the perimeter through support for identity assertion. Provided as a critical piece of the WebLogic Security Framework, the concept of identity assertion allows WebLogic Server to use the authentication mechanism provided by perimeter authentication schemes such as the … Read More
Should I always use an Oracle sequence?
Oracle die-hard purists will generally swear up and down about using a sequence for assigning a unique identifier to an record/entity. However, are there situations when you might to consider avoiding this practice?
The below video explains that computer systems have been able to guess social security numbers for 8.5% of people born since 1989. That is alarming for a number of reasons. But it also got me thinking about situations I may have come across in the business world (and IT in general) that could suffer from a similar problem.
BPMN 2.0 vs BPEL (Oracle BPM VS SOA Suite)
This post covers Oracle Open World Insights, followed by a BPEL/BPMN comparison, and design discussion. This is an interesting topic to me, since very little has been published and the product direction was clearly shown at OOW. I have also seen the difficulties of BPMN round tripping, which leads me to believe BPMN 2.0 is going to be great for functional process models, but will enforce a rigid process architecture on the technical model, leaving developers with a process architecture that is difficult to work with.