Novell Outlines Two New Services for Managing Identities Across the Web

Businesses will be able to rapidly provide customers and employees with single sign-on to a multitude of Web sites and reach across the Internet to form secure, profitable relationships with business partners thanks to two new services from Novell. These services, the Liberty identity provider for Novell® eDirectory™ and the SAML extension for Novell iChain®, enhance the company's Nsure™ secure identity management solutions to better address the demands of federated identity.

An early access release of the Liberty identity provider for Novell eDirectory, previously code-named Saturn, is available today as a free download to customers worldwide. Using the Liberty Alliance version 1.1 specifications, Novell's Liberty identity provider allows businesses to securely establish links among internal, external and partner Web sites, giving users single sign-on between those Web sites via open standards. Equally important, the Liberty identity provider allows the users themselves to decide whether their identities will be federated from one Web site to another. Offering standards-based single sign-on helps companies drive more value from business relationships, build a more loyal customer base and help employees be more productive.

"Building Liberty Alliance support on top of eDirectory is a logical step for Novell, and one that complements its stated direction around secure identity management and the Destiny roadmap," said Michael Neuenschwander, senior analyst with the Burton Group. "Enterprises already have millions of identities managed by Novell eDirectory, so it is very compelling to share identity information based on the Liberty specification."

The SAML extension for Novell iChain will be available in June as a free download to iChain customers. It uses the Secure Assertions Markup Language standard to allow businesses to securely share authentication and user attribute information with partners and suppliers across the Web - enabling secure, Internet-based transactions plus the ability to provide customers a more complete set of personalized services that span offerings from a number of vendors. And thanks to iChain's proxy-based architecture, customers can deploy these SAML-enabled services without having to modify their existing infrastructure.

Both the Liberty identity provider and the SAML extension address federated identity, but each offers unique benefits depending on customer requirements. Because of the broad industry agreement around the Liberty Alliance specifications, the Liberty identity provider can be almost immediately deployed to give users single sign-on across many Web sites; but that agreement also naturally limits the flexibility of the Liberty specs. The SAML extension on the other hand offers a more flexible federated identity service that can be fine-tuned to the specific needs of individual business relationships.

"Secure, seamless access to information and applications across company boundaries is at the heart of Novell's one Net vision; and that's exactly what these new Liberty and SAML services make possible," said Chris Stone, Novell vice chairman - Office of the CEO. "Adding those components to the Nsure brand - to address the unique challenges of managing identity outside the firewall - does nothing short of take the best secure identity management solution on the market and make it better."

An early access release of the Liberty identity provider for Novell eDirectory is available today to allow customers to begin evaluating the use of the Liberty Alliance specifications in their own environments. The service will also be on display throughout this week at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco as part of the Liberty Alliance interoperability demonstration. The SAML extension for Novell iChain will be available in June.