Identity Management Roadmap Redrawn

An Identity Lifecycle Manager product planned for mid-2007 will merge Microsoft’s primary identity management product, Identity Integration Server, with digital certificate management technology acquired from Alacris. Identity management, the process of maintaining volatile data about people, such as credentials, names, and addresses, across multiple directories and applications, remains a challenge in large organizations. In addition, Identity Lifecycle Manager promises to simplify the task of managing a critical type of identity data-user credentials for strong authentication methods-but also imposes new license fees for those features.

(See the illustration “Identity Management Roadmap“.)

New Name, Certificate Features

Announced Feb. 2007, Identity Lifecycle Manager will incorporate Identity Integration Server, which helps organizations manage multiple stores of identity data, such as employee names, e-mail addresses, and passwords, so that administrators can easily create or modify identity data, synchronize that data across stores, and obtain a single view of the identity information. A key scenario for Identity Integration Server has been enabling interoperability between Active Directory and other identity data stores.