Novell Fulfilling Its Web Destiny
As part of an 18-month road map for directory technologies, dubbed Destiny, the Provo, Utah-based company plans to integrate support for the Liberty Alliance Project's first specification in its directory service products.
The Liberty Alliance Project, a team of companies led by Sun Microsystems, aims to develop an open standard for user authentication and user-data distribution/storage in Web services. Sun and other companies, including RealNetworks, Bank of America, Cisco Systems and Nokia, unveiled the Liberty Alliance Project last September as an alternative digital identity solution to Microsoft's Passport service.
Under the Destiny initiative, Novell intends to incorporate support for the Liberty Alliance Project specification, Microsoft Passport in eDirectory and other directory services, said Novell executives.
"Novell's eDirectory is a mature offering that already provides compelling functionality, reliability and security, but it does lack support from developers of applications and network services," said Carlos Paz-Soldan, vice president of technology and services at Tenet Computer Group, a Novell-named partner based in Toronto. "By adding support for Microsoft's Passport and the Liberty Alliance Project, Novell would ensure native interoperability with a wide range of applications and services."
Novell expects over the next 18 months to deliver support for a wide range of Web services technologies and specifications including XML, SOAP, UDDI and an emerging Web services standard dubbed Security Assertion Markup Language. SAML will enable Web-based authentication services such as Microsoft Passport.Net and the Liberty Alliance Project specification to interoperate.
Destiny also includes a Novell effort to enable dynamic identity management across multiple enterprises. "This expands way beyond the enterprise and allows companies to do identity management on the Web for public services and to coordinate business transactions between partners," said Ed Anderson, director of product management for Novell's identity services group.