Q:  What exactly does 99.9% guaranteed uptime mean (for Go Daddy)?

A:  For Go Daddy, it means that if they don’t provide the 99.9% uptime in a given month, you can ask for a 5% credit for that month.  I don’t know exactly what we are paying on a monthly basis, but that equals chump-change.  It also means that they could be down for the ENTIRE month and you are only eligible for the same 5% credit.  That’s a great business model if you ask me.

Then it hit me.  One of the very weapons that we use to complete with larger competitors (such as Oracle)  is the fact that we are nimble and able to move quickly and provide personal attention.  Bug fixes and enhancements can be measured in days, not quarters or years.  For the big vendors, the customers are nothing more than a number and they don’t really care about any one clients issues or problems.  Since the first day we started Optimal IdM, our mission was to take care of the customer by providing the personalized attention and details.  I think this has worked out extremely well over the course of our business life and can be reflected through our customers experiences.

The moral of this story is to get to know your cloud provider (or any other technology vendor for that matter).  Know their processes for support and know the guarantees.  Kick the tires a bit before you buy, and most of all talk to their customers before you sign up to understand what the experience is like.  After all, word-of-mouth is still one of the most powerful marketing tools on the planet.

Now to return back to the Quest acquisition of Symlabs, it’s worth nothing that the intention of this acquisition was not for Quest to enter into the virtual directory market, but rather to leverage the technology to make their own products better.  This tells me that they are pretty forward in their thinking of how to solve some common LDAP related issues that exist in many products on the market today.  As Dave Kearns points out in this article, this is the same reason that many companies purchase these products.  I believe this trend will continue, but what’s interesting to note is that as these vendors get swallowed up by the bigger vendors to solve their own internal issues, they are removing products from the market that are proving to be a vital part of the identity management technology stack.  After this latest acquisition, Symlabs customers will be asking questions and perhaps seeking a replacement product.  In order to ease this transition, Optimal IdM, will be making special offers to existing Symlabs customers to help them migrate to the Virtual Identity Server solution at a very low cost and no increase to their existing support expense.  Stay tuned for more details or contact Sales for more information.

Any claims-aware application that supports AD FS 2.0 (such as SharePoint 2010 and Unified Access Gateway or UAG) can now leverage the powerful features of the Virtual Identity Server (Virtual Directory), without even knowing about VIS!  Simply configure the claims-aware application to AD FS 2.0, then configure AD FS 2.0 to trust the new VIS FS STS, and that’s it!!  For more details about this new product, please stop by our booth at The Experts Conference 2011 in Las Vegas April 17-20!

• Ability to search on multiple different attributes (not just the user id), at the same time
• Configurable list of attributes to return to user
• Ability to sort results
• Easy to use interface that includes a paged grid view
• Ability for administrators to apply various filters on the results based on group memberships (filtering based on RBAC)
• Ability for administrators to create search templates (for commonly used searches)
• Ability for administrators to apply different filters for permission searches

Optimal People Picker

See you at the show and hope you don’t get delayed by the Volcano in Iceland!

These technologies have some level of overlap, but it is critical to know when to use each one and more importantly when not to use one.  I’ve known Mike a long time and he loves to use the analogy that you can drive a car from one end of the country to the other (say New York to Los Angeles), but the better choice to get from one to the other is certainly not by driving these days, but rather by flying.  The same logic should be applied with these technologies, for example, you may choose to duplicate/sync your users from two different AD forests into a consolidated ‘enterprise’ directory, but you must consider the new problems you just created to solve other problems and perhaps choose a alternative solution.

The bottom line on this topic is that you should consider that for each problem you are attempting to solve, how many new problems are you creating?  In the above example, you know have created a password synchronization problem with your solution (not to mention data latency), so be careful with your choices.

The whte paper Mike is referring to also includes detailed use-cases on this topic combined with the Virtual Identity Server.  Click the link to download the new white paper ‘When to Synchronize, Virtualize and Federate data in the Enterprise‘ white paper.

Now with the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010, we have stayed on top of each release from Microsoft, including the most recent release candidate (SharePoint 2010 RC).  We are pleased to say that VIS for SharePoint (2010 RC), is fully operational and we are looking to support the final version when it is released to market (which we hope will be soon).

As such, Optimal IdM remains the true leader in SharePoint deployments across multiple back-end data stores including:

• Multiple AD domains/forests (yes, with a single SharePoint deployment)
• Multiple LDAP types (AD, AD-LDS/ADAM, Sun, etc.)
• Multiple data sources (SQL, Oracle, etc.), which can be used to make SharePoint security decisions from

All of this in real-time or near real-time.  Virtual Identity Server (VIS) is still the only true Microsoft centric and Microsoft friendly virtual directory vendor on the market.  To learn more about our VIS for SharePoint integration, click here, or to watch a video of its powerfulness in action, click here.

• Smoke a cigarette
• Wash your car
• Take a shower
• Make Breakfast (toast doesn’t count)
• Drink a cup of coffee
• Commute to work (well, this one wouldn’t apply to telecommuters) – Heck, I’ve seen red-lights that last 5 minutes!!

My point here is that it’s incredible to think of how easy we made the installation and configuration of VIS.  This allow our clients the ability to spend more time on planning and thinking of just how to benefit from this technology, and less time thinking/worrying about how to get the darn thing to work (out-of-the-box).  Be sure to check out some of the other videos in our growing collection.

Law VI:  A Virtual Directory MUST NOT have a large footprint:  Optimal IdM’s Virtual Identity Server, for example, takes up less than 5 MB of disk space.  If you add in the Compliance Management system and the SharePoint integration, it climbs to only 25 MB.  The bottom line here is that VIS uses a single XML file for its configuration information, and relies on NO registry information to function (just a simple Windows service).  For requirements, the 2.0 Framework (or higher), is all you need to go.  Be careful of other solutions that require ugly JVM’s, and/or complicated configuration elements.

Law VII:  A Virtual Directory MUST NOT be difficult to support:  Optimal IdM’s Virtual Identity Server, runs on both Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 in a single code-base.  For this reason, VIS is easy to support.  No worries of platform supportability here, in fact, VIS is officially certified on both Server 2003 and 2008 (including 64-bit).

Law VIII:  A Virtual Directory MUST be a VALUE ADD:  Since Virtual Directories are in essence LDAP Servers, there is an opportunity to make your LDAP experience “better”.  LDAP V3 has been around since 1997 (that’s a lifetime it technology years).  A Virtual Directory can provide features that should be built-into LDAP (perhaps standard one day in V4).  We like to refer to VIS as “LDAP++”, because it improves the users experience around LDAP.  (Watch for a future blog on LDAP++, or “LDAP on steroids”).

Law IX:  A Virtual Directory MUST NOT introduce too many proprietary elements:  A Virtual Directory should not introduce ANYTHING proprietary to your environment.  That includes proprietary data stores, caching, ports, etc.  Optimal IdM’s Virtual Identity Server, is complete WITHOUT any proprietary elements.  Be careful of systems that include complex proprietary elements.  (Complex & Proprietary = additional administration costs).

Law X:  A Virtual Directory MUST NOT require custom coding:  One of the most comment features of a Virtual Directory is handling joins and merges of data.  If it’s so common, why do vendors require you to write custom code to handle it?  How about caching?  Same problem, some vendors requires custom development just to handle basic elements of virtualization.  Optimal IdM’s Virtual Identity Server, is point-n-click for 99% of all features (with NO coding).  However, extensibility is available and in a common in-expensive langue (.NET).  Be careful of customization costs/efforts of other vendors and the language they require development in.  All this time, I thought Python was a snake….  How many people actually know what “Python” is anyway?