Identity Management Strategy Updated

Identity management, the process of maintaining volatile data about people such as names, titles, and addresses across multiple directories and applications, remains a challenge in large organizations. To help customers address identity management, Microsoft has released Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003 (formerly called Metadirectory Server) and Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM), and it will support the latest version of the Directory Services Markup Language (an XML-based specification for describing directory information). These tools go a long way toward integrating an organization’s identity information, but total support for business-to-business identity information sharing is still in the future.

Identity Management

Identity data is composed of attributes about a person, such as his name, e-mail addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, titles, user accounts, and passwords. Identity management addresses the problems of maintaining this identity data across many independently maintained systems that need the identity data. Examples of systems include the following: OSs and their directories, such as Windows with Active Directory (AD), which use identity data to determine access to files, applications, and other resources; key applications for tracking people, such as human resources and customer relationship management systems; communications directories, such as the corporate phone directory and e-mail directories for applications like Exchange; and corporate intranets and extranets, which use identity data for access control and personalization. These systems frequently have their own databases or stores for the identity data they use.