Tempus Fugit

I remember being a follower of a blogger who wrote about IBM Tivoli security solutions and becoming quite concerned for his well being when he "stopped" blogging for a while. When he had gone fully six months without blogging, I had myself convinced that something terrible had happened to him personally.

And now I find that I have done the same thing. My periodical briefings have stopped. But fear not - it's not because of any ill health. It's not because of a change in career. It's not even to do with boredom. It has everything to do with being far too busy and that's the best reason of all for the temporary blip in my output.

But, time flies... and too much time has passed since I last committed my thoughts to writing.

So what has happened since in the last 6 months? Well, the IBM Tivoli re-branding exercise is in full swing with IBM Security Identity Manager and IBM Security Access Manager products having been released.

And what has changed in those products?

ISAM has a brand new deployment process which is greatly simplified. However, for TAMeb users who have deployed their software on Windows, beware? The upgrade process might not behave as you expect? Why? The move to a 64-bit architecture, that's why? Think seriously about any attempt to perform an in-situ upgrade!

You might like to also check compression settings on your WebSEALs - a respected colleague of mine has already encountered some fun and games with those!

And ISIM? Is it just a pure re-branding exercise? Not at all. Some functional additions are definitely welcome like the controls added to the services offering retry operations on failed resources. Account ownership and role attributes look interesting (despite how they have been implemented). Privileged Identity Management is a great addition as is the inclusion of supported web services API.

But core processing that ITIM administrators will know and love is still there!

And what of my work recently? Well, it's a matter of spending a lot of time concentrating on federated security, and environmental upgrades. Working on pre-sales; sprucing up designs; sizing projects; and helping those around me get best use out of their IBM Tivoli/Security solutions.

So much has happened in recent months, though, that I hardly know where to start in documenting it all. There has been fun with SAML v2. Flirtations with FESI extension re-writes. Dalliances with web services and APIs. Encounters with business process re-engineering.

My next article, however, will likely be an IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator article centred on best practice for collaborative development. That sounds like a tricky one!