Novell Begins to See Fruits of Destiny

Provo, Utah’s Novell Wednesday delivered the first
product in the Destiny roadmap for its eDirectory software: a UDDI
server with support for secure identity management.

Novell said its Nsure UDDI Server will allow businesses to register Web
services and make them available to internal or external users, while
leveraging the security and management capabilities of eDirectory. The
server can require users — whether publishing or consuming services — to
authenticate to the directory and verify their identity. Additionally, with
the product, the users, their access rights, and the registered Web
services can be managed with eDirectory tools like Novell iManager.

The Destiny roadmap, which Novell unveiled in July, defined Novell’s directory releases for 18 months, beginning
with the Nsure UDDI server. With Destiny, Novell is betting it can capture
a leadership position in secure identity management, a key component of Web
services.

Project Destiny focuses on four areas: Web services, Dynamic Identity,
Intelligent Infrastructure and Federated Trust.

It plans to follow up on the UDDI server with native XML and
SOAP support, building on the tools it gained through its
acquisition of SilverStream.

Meanwhile, Novell’s Dynamic Identity efforts are intended to allow
directories to manage identities more fluidly, giving them the ability to
represent identity based on the needs of the particular service they are
serving. For instance, the company said a travel Web site may only need a
stripped down representation of identity based on a user’s company and
frequent flyer number, while an accounting application would need more
robust data, like a complete profile which includes the user’s job role and
budgetary constraints.

On the Intelligent Infrastructure front, Novell is working to integrate a
policy engine with directory, giving the directory the ability to make
decisions about data and relationships based on business rules.

Finally, in the Federated Trust aspect of the roadmap, Novell said it would
use open standards like Secure Assertion Markup Language , or
SAML, and specifications put forward by the Liberty Alliance, to enable the
federation of security credentials. This, in turn, will allow businesses to
securely integrate their networks with those of their customers, partners,
employees and suppliers.