NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: DAVE KEARNS ON IDENTITY MANAGEMENT 11/08/04 Today's focus: Getting social with your online identity
Dear [EMAIL PROTECTED], In this issue: * Midentity helps you control your online personal identity * Links related to Identity Management * Featured reader resource _______________________________________________________________ This newsletter is sponsored by Imprivata Enterprise Single Sign-On: The critical questions every company needs to ask There are a growing number of Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO) solutions, each with its own capabilities, associated costs, resource requirements, deployment needs, and implementation times. This white paper is intended to make the ESSO evaluation process simpler and faster by identifying the critical questions you need to ask when you are evaluating ESSO solutions. http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=88124 _______________________________________________________________ SECURTIY SUMMIT: CAN SECURITY BE A COMPETITIVE EDGE? Recently 23 prominent IT executives and academics gathered at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH for a daylong roundtable to address such questions. CIOs and VPs from some of the largest and most well-known companies in the US shared with peers their security fears, goals, frustrations and challenges. Find out more: http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=87859 _______________________________________________________________ Today's focus: Getting social with your online identity By Dave Kearns There seems to be a push for more personal control of identity information. Two companies I came across at the recent Digital ID World show exemplify this. Sxip Networks, now a-year-old, is the brainchild of Dick Hardt. Hardt also founded ActiveState, a leader in open source programming languages and anti-spam software, which was acquired in 2003 by U.K.'s security software company, Sophos. Midentity, only slighty older than Sxip, grew out of the fertile imagination of Simon Grice, a co-founder of eTribes, which specializes in online communities. Grice appears to like capitalizing the second letter of words. Both Sxip and mIdentity provide a way for an individual to share personal identity data in a fine-grained manner. Today, we'll look closely at mIdentity and examine Sxip in the next issue. The Midentity product reminds me in many ways of the late, lamented DigitalME project Novell launched some years ago, as well Novell's more recent (but still dormant) personal directory project ( <http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2002/01331333.html> ). At the Digital ID World conference, each attendee was invited to fill out a personal information document (complete with picture) and publish it on the Midentity network for the show. This allowed attendees to contact each other and see their picture to identify them if they needed to meet. The full-blown product mIdentity software (downloadable from the Midentity Web site <http://www.midentity.com/download/download.htm> ) installs on your Windows desktop and interfaces with your Outlook and mobile phone address books. Any Midentity-enabled contact in your address book is then automatically updated whenever that user changes information that is published. You can, of course, choose which information to publish to any given user. In many ways, this is similar to Plaxo ( <http://www.plaxo.com/> ) or LinkedIn ( <http://www.linkedin.com/> ) and other social networking apps that try to keep contact information accurate and useful. That certainly reflects Grice's eTribes background but he has bigger plans than simply up-to-date address books. As he says, as long as you're sharing e-mail addresses, home page URLs and phone numbers you could also be sharing presence information (whether you're logged in or not), location and conversations. Much of what's currently available for Midentity, and much of the discussion on the Web site, is geared more towards finding people with your cell phone. That was the genesis, but Grice has grabbed the concept of directory-based services very well and envisions much more to come in the way of service oriented activities for users. He's coming from one direction, while a number of electronic provisioning companies that I spoke to at the recent Mobile ID Services show, are also discovering that people want to be able to locate services through identity applications using personal profile data along with phones that have GPS functionality. You can download and use the Midentity client for free, although there are more extensive services available for a subscription fee as well as an instant messaging application so that you can chat with your contacts. This is the beginning of something growing out of Web-based social communities that might be useful in business as well as personal environments. It can't hurt to check on it. RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS Etribes http://www.etribes.com/ Midentity http://www.midentity.com/ Sxip Networks http://www.sxip.com/ _______________________________________________________________ To contact: Dave Kearns Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found at Virtual Quill <http://www.vquill.com/>. Kearns is the author of three Network World Newsletters: Windows Networking Tips, Novell NetWare Tips, and Identity Management. Comments about these newsletters should be sent to him at these respective addresses: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Kearns provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more by e-mail at <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________________________ This newsletter is sponsored by Imprivata Enterprise Single Sign-On: The critical questions every company needs to ask There are a growing number of Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO) solutions, each with its own capabilities, associated costs, resource requirements, deployment needs, and implementation times. This white paper is intended to make the ESSO evaluation process simpler and faster by identifying the critical questions you need to ask when you are evaluating ESSO solutions. http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=88123 _______________________________________________________________ ARCHIVE LINKS Breaking identity management news from Network World, updated daily: http://www.nwfusion.com/topics/directories.html Archive of the Identity Management newsletter: http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/index.html _______________________________________________________________ FEATURED READER RESOURCE NEW! Website dedicated to Networking for Small Business now available The editors of NW Fusion and PC World have combined all their expert advice, authority, and know-how into a powerful new tool for small businesses, the new Networking for Small Business website. Get news, how-to's, product reviews, and expert advice specifically tailored to your small business needs. 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