Microsoft Releases Beta For Identity Management App

Speaking at the Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 IT Professionals conference in Orlando, Fla., Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, also provided attendees with Microsoft's vision for bringing virtualization capabilities to desktops and applications, and demonstrated the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 console for managing virtualized environments.

Identity Lifecycle Management helps businesses provide employees with passwords and manage their access to workflows and IT resources such as e-mail; manage changes in access privileges; revoke credentials when necessary; and enforce security access policies.

"There's a lot of challenges with identities," Muglia told the estimated 10,000 attendees in a keynote. "One of the key things we're doing with [Identity Lifecycle Management 2] is automating the process of managing the life cycle of identity management. This is a product that's focused on a problem that effectively all organizations have."

The public beta of Identity Lifecycle Management 2 follows two limited beta releases earlier this year. Microsoft is shooting to debut a release candidate beta of the software in the fourth quarter, with the final release to manufacturing version slated for early 2009, said Douglas Leland, general manager of Microsoft's identity and access business group, in a press conference following Muglia's keynote.

Identity management is a hot topic, not just for security but also for complying with company policies and government regulations, and for reducing IT management costs. "Today there is a significant burden on, primarily, IT organizations and help desks for managing identities and access privileges," Leland said. "The state of the art in the market today for identity and access management is, quite frankly, underdelivered."

Leland said Microsoft's strategy is to provide identity management solutions for on-premise and on-demand applications running either in physical or virtual environments. Microsoft also will build an administration console into SharePoint for managing identities and add user self-service capabilities, such as profile management and password reset, to Microsoft Office.

New features in Identity Lifecycle Management 2 include heterogeneous identity synchronization, management of multiple credential types, automated user provisioning and de-provisioning, automated group and distribution list updates, and integrated provisioning of identities, credentials and resources.

In other identity management news, CA Monday unveiled several new identity management and compliance applications, adding to a product lineup it began assembling last fall.

On the virtualization front, Muglia's comments come as Microsoft is on the verge of shipping Hyper-V, its first virtualization product to compete with products from VMware and Citrix Systems. While the final release to manufacturing version of Hyper-V is slated for August, Muglia said, "We're going to beat that." And he added it will cost "a fraction of what you're paying for virtualization today."

While the first release of Hyper-V will focus on server virtualization, Muglia said the real benefits of virtualization will come with application virtualization, slated for a future version of Hyper-V, that separates the application from the underlying operating system. The executive said Microsoft is also working with Citrix on desktop and presentation virtualization.