OpenID Connect, one of the more important emerging identity protocols, is nearing completion and is poised to be battle tested in 2012.

As those milestones approach, the OpenID Foundation, which is developing the spec, will kickoff this Monday ( Jan. 9) its annual election for community board members.

Experts are predicting that OpenID Connect and protocols such as OAuth 2.0, which is the foundation for OpenID Connect, will make a big impact this year on the identity landscape. 

The two provide glue for creating a distributed identity network in the cloud. OpenID helps define how two parties can use OAuth2.0 to communicate about identity. In addition, they both figure prominently in the development of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). (Go here for a graphical representation of the spec and to read more about its technical side ).

Now might be the time to get involved and have a say. Perhaps not as a board member, but as an active participant or interested corporate executive or identity architect. Only OpenID Foundation members can vote, but there is still time to join.

Up for grabs are two seats on the community board. Each is a two-year appointment. There are five returning corporate board members (disclosure: including Ping Identity).

Here is the election schedule:
Nominations open: Monday, Jan. 9
Nominations close: Monday, Jan. 23
Election begins: Wed., Jan. 25
Election ends: Wed., Feb. 8
Results announced by: Wed., Feb. 15
New board terms start: Thurs., March 1

Times for all dates are Noon, U.S. Pacific Time.

We recently shipped PingFederate 6.5. A major new feature in this release was support for the OAuth protocol as an Authorization Server (AS). OAuth is a new kind of single sign-on (SSO) protocol and token, designed to allow a client to access a server on behalf of a user, without needing the user’s credentials for each access.

As application programming interfaces (APIs) become more popular to access services and data programmatically, OAuth is becoming the identity method of choice. Popularized by Salesforce.com, Facebook and Twitter, OAuth is used by many mobile and Web-based clients, such as Tweetdeck, HootSuite and Marketo. Our enterprise customers have started asking us for this so that they can build their own APIs to support mobile apps. Fortunately, we have been able to offer this quickly, due to our agile development processes.

However, there is more to a major new capability like this than programming in the product. We need to be able to advise, configure, install, and support this software for our customers. This means that our regional solution architects and our product support engineers must have a deep, practical knowledge of this new technology and our implementation of it. “Bleeding edge” means that we will be called upon in these early days to sort things out for early adopters.

In early August, we tried a new training approach. For three days, all the technicians got together with the Ping Identity OAuth brain trust for a hands-on mind-meld. We reserved conference rooms in our Denver and Waltham offices and connected them with video conferencing. Folks who couldn’t attend in person dialed into the conference remotely.

[More]

On a regular basis we offer technical round-tables to highlight the best parts of Ping, its technology and its products. 

The most recent edition featured Beau Christensen, one of our PingConnect Site Reliability Engineers. Beau has been working for the last two years on improving the operation and reliability of PingConnect, our federation service. He used his roundtable time to discuss Splunk and its network log monitoring tool, which has proven to be an invaluable member of Beau's team. Beau took time out to tell round-table attendees about what Splunk is and how PingConnect uses it.

Beau calls Splunk “Google for log files”. Besides a lightening-fast query engine for all things text, Splunk includes indexers to support the query engine, and forwarders to collect files from endpoints. Beau uses Splunk to index such operational text items as audit log files, configuration files, and output from script execution.

If you’d like to learn more, we’ve made the video from the round-table available in our training center: TRT4: Using Splunk to Monitor SSO. It’s about 45 minutes long and includes valuable Q&A from attendees.

[More]

Ping Identity User Groups are forming!

Currently, three groups have a customer leader, are launched and have already met for the first time:

• Austin, Texas, led by Jeff Richardson, Bank of America
• Bay Area, California, led by Parvez Lalani, Autodesk
• Twin Cities, Minnesota, led by Bob Brandt, 3M

We are actively looking for leaders interested in starting groups in Boston, New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, London, Copenhagen.... and your city as well! Additionally, we are exploring interest in a virtual group for customers who are unable to form local groups.

User Groups are independent, customer led groups that decide their charter and membership criteria. Ping Indentity will provide logistical and technical support as requested. These groups will provide yet another bi-directional communication path for customers to voice their opinions and needs collectively.

At these first three meetings, we had some great topics of discussion:

• How to hire a developer to build API’s for you? ( when the business says that you are an operations group and don’t write any code)
• How are you organized to deliver identity management and who are your cusotmers?
• How do you deal w/ partners that have never heard of SAML?
• How could the documenation for PingFederate be improved?
• How to get staff trained more quickly so that they are productive?
• How about opening this User Group to the IAM community at large?

For current information about the user groups, see our Support Center user group page.
Use our user group form to provide your contact information and we will connect you to the group closest to you.

Well, almost.

Recently Eric Fazendin, our client services manager, presented a technical round-table to a group of our customers.  His topic was “Building a PingFederate Adapter”. He made it look easy. And actually, it is.

PingFederate has a modular architecture that uses adapters to communicate with different types of authentication systems and to interact with a Web application in the way most natural to its developers.

Eric shows how to build a custom IDP OpenToken adapter using the PingFederate SDK, the PingFederate quick-start sample application and a simple Web access managment system he built called WAM Central.  He develops the adapter in Java using the Eclipse integrated development environment.  

You can watch Eric write the code using the PingFederate SDK in this video.  He also answers questions from the attendees.

Eric’s Client Services group is the service arm of Ping Identity.  Eric’s team offers installation, training, custom coding, system management and a host of other essential services, collectively known as Ping Enable Services.

Meet Eric and other identity experts from various companies at the 2nd Annual Cloud Identity Summit, July 18-21 in Keystone, Colo

One of the best things about being Ping Identity’s Community Evangelist is working with our customers. Whenever we survey them, they tell us good things, and I can sure feel the appreciation of Ping's hard work when I have the chance to interact with them. Outstanding customer service is a core value; from our regional solutions architects, led by Tom Doyle, and our maniacal product support engineers, led by Mark Bostley.

And we are boosting that value by aggregating all our resources and stirring the pot with even more support tools.

We have pulled all our help offerings together into our Support Center  and expanded the content. Now it is easier than ever to navigate our many offerings, including a new Knowledge Base, a Training Center, and a User Groups page. We also have product documentation, an Answers/Ideas forum and its all adressable from a single search point. We think this goes a long way toward satisfying the needs of our growing customer base, which now tops 600. We enjoy the face-to-face energy we get from those in the field, but now we also offer quicker avenues to resources and resolution for those times in between.

Let me walk you through what we have built, what is there, why you would want to use it and hand out some kudos to those who built it for you.

[More]

I wear the label “geek” proudly.  This is not to be confused with “dweeb”, “dork”, or even worse, “nerd”.  As brilliantly captured in the Nerd Venn Diagram, a geek is somebody who has intelligence and obsession.  Fortunately, I work for a company where these two qualities are very highly prized.  And best of all, many of our customers qualify as geeks.

A couple of weeks ago we hosted our second technical round-table for Ping Identity support customers.  These technical round-tables are meant to enhance our value to our customers by giving them direct access to Ping Identity technical experts in a question and answer format. This one was a geek-fest!  I was able to snag for our speaker one of our chief geeks, Pamela Dingle, Senior Technical Architect in the Office of the CTO.Her subject was “Federated SSO: Best Practices”.  

[More]

The most common theme in enterprise IT is bottoms up adoption. Look at the milestones; the PC, desktop apps, collaborative apps, the Internet. Users bring to work the tools they want to use; IT plays defense until they can’t defend anymore and than a revolution is born.

Salesforce.com gets that. And a revolution is being born.

Today, the company kicked off its 8^th Dreamforce conference and pulled together a number of exploding IT trends - social networking, online database storage and application development, mobile computing and made it all relevant to collaboration in the enterprise so corporations can get real work done and make real dollars.

Now there’s a motivator.

[More]