Novell News

The ODF Alliance has put out a press release around the Berlin ODF Workshop I blogged about last week. Sounds like it was an interesting event, and that there’s growing momentum in the public sector worldwide around open document formats. The ODF Alliance also put out a release last week pointing out recent application support for ODF, including, among others, offerings from IBM, Apple, Sun, Corel, and Adobe. Good stuff.

The Global Services division of BT, one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services operating in 170 countries, is using ZENwoks Asset Management to reduce costs and increase compliance. To find out how they are doing it, go here.

There’s an interesting ODF shindig happening early next week in Germany. The ODF Workshop taking place in Berlin is touted as the first international OpenDocument Format user workshop. Sponsored by the German Federal Foreign Office in collaboration with the ODF Alliance, of which Novell is a member, the workshop is designed for government entities that are either already using open document formats, or interested in deploying them. A look at the agenda indicates a fairly hands-on event, with sessions on ODF Migration, deployment in municipalities, application support, and other issues organizations considering ODF would want to know about. Participants are representatives from various levels of government, with a number of open source vendors, including Novell, acting as panel moderators.

This should be a good event to get the pulse on ODF adoption in Europe.

I went to an interesting panel recently on data breach readiness. The focus of the event was on how companies should communicate when a data breach happens. The industry experts also touched on the status of data breaches, recent major occurrences and some upcoming trends. Some good nuggets from the discussion:
- the awareness of data breaches as a security problem exists; companies and consumers just aren’t sure what to do about it
- all types and sizes of businesses, from financial institutions to your favorite neighborhood restaurant, are susceptible; all organizations should add security to their business plan
- new employees are a major source of data breaches; many times the breach isn’t uncovered until they leave the organization
- data thieves are becoming more organized; they are being strategic and outsourcing parts of their scams

What can companies do to protect themselves? Some recommendations from the panelists included having internal policies in place about protecting data, locating where in the organization sensitive data is being stored, consolidating data and utilizing a variety of security practices around access, privileges, data masking, endpoint monitoring and encryption.

For future trends, the experts pointed to the increased security risk as wireless technologies become more prevalent, increased legislation to try to curb data breaches and increase consumer protection, a decrease in companies storing data and data thieves targeting smaller companies as it becomes easier to steal data.

This discussion convinced me that Novell is developing the right mix of solutions and working with the right partners to help companies secure their data. We’ve partnered with Honeywell to ensure that physical and logical security are tightly integrated; our identity and access management solutions can track who has access to what data and what they are doing with the data as well as ensure companies are compliant with government regulations; our event management solution can automatically monitor IT networks and provide alerts for any kind of anomalous activity or policy violation; our endpoint security solutions protect company data from unauthorized removal in any location; and our open source Bandit project is enabling users to control the amount of data they provide online.

The Novell-sponsored open source identity Bandit project has been hard at work developing, refining and promoting its information card selector DigitalMe. Now the project has been recognized for its efforts with a Privacy Innovation Award in the Technology category from the world’s largest association of privacy professionals, the HP-IAPP.

“DigitalMe is a great example of innovative technology,” remarked one Innovation Award judge. “It helps manage credentials and other personal information during interactions with Web sites, and could be used in Web 2.0 environments. This entry is truly thoughtful and innovative.”

We couldn’t agree more.

We announced a few weeks ago that it was coming, and it has arrived … Novell Teaming + Conferencing is now available. As we said then, this team workspace and real-time collaboration solution will help boost end-user and team productivity and reduce costs by improving the everyday ways people create, share, discuss and manage information.

You can download the eval here.

from Dale Olds, Novell Distinguished Engineer and Bandit Project Leader

Network World’s Dave Kearns, Microsoft’s Kim Cameron and other identity experts have recently commented on Burton Group Analyst Bob Blakley’s notion of an Identity Oracle — a service that answers questions about identity information, without revealing the information itself. Such a service would be similar to the service provided by the ancient greek oracles.

I first heard of it in Bob’s talk at the Burton Catalyst conference in June 2006. It was a classic Bob talk with lots of interesting concepts and memorable phrases. For example he strongly contrasted the identity meta-system with his idea of a meta-identity system. It’s something to contemplate sometime. Maybe. Maybe late at night when you can’t sleep. Or early in the morning. After coffee. Actually the idea is significant, even though the contentious prefix “meta” is used. Central to the talk was the concept of an Identity Oracle.

I will stress — as do Bob and Dave — that the Identity Oracle is not a technology, it’s a business. Its business model relies on a particular structure of where identity data is stored, how answers to questions about that data are answered, who pays, and who gets paid for giving answers and properly managing the identity data. The business model is concerned about issues of liability, structuring transactions to increase efficiency, and reducing risk to consumers. Nevertheless, this business model requires that technology be available that can implement it. In that respect, I also agree with Kim.

Much of the open standards and identity system infrastructure to support such a business model are available now. For example, Novell and the Bandit Project recently kicked of a campaign to increase awareness of information card technology. The Bandit Cards site holds identity information that the user has entered. It releases that information to consuming services under the control of the user’s identity selector. The actual identity data is retrieved via the Eclipse Higgins Project Security Token Service deployed in the Cards site. It is an illustration of all basic system components needed to implement the Identity Oracle business model — and they’re open source and available now.

In fact, it is interesting that the concept of an Identity Oracle has so visibly resurfaced. Why now? It could be because the number of systems that support the necessary protocol flows and identity data management capabilities are greatly increasing — and they are being deployed. It’s an exciting thought. Many very significant instances of theft or loss of identity information repositories have been reported in the past few years. Systems such as the information cards used by Bandit and Microsoft Cardspace enable a fundamental refactoring of how identity data is managed. A refactoring that supports new business models such as the Identity Oracle.

There are a lot of open source projects out there, many of which fly below the radar. There’s one out there that encompasses two big open source worlds – Linux and Eclipse. This story talks about Eclipse on Linux, and includes insight from Novell’s Matt Ryan, who helped draft the project proposal. Matt notes that the project has not had the immediate success that you would expect, but the experts also recognize the cross-platform potential the project offers which should ultimately help grow Linux.

Congratulations to the good folks at the openSUSE project. In the first four days of the availability of openSUSE 10.3, it saw a third more installations than did openSUSE 10.2 in a similar period. In addition, openSUSE.org page views per day totals for 10.3 were 85 percent higher than for 10.2, and visits at openSUSE.org for 10.3 had a 125 percent jump over 10.2. Bottom line, openSUSE 10.3 has had the most successful launch ever for openSUSE.org. The openSUSE community is working hard to provide a top-notch distro, and users are responding.

The Economist this week has a special report on innovation. Not surprisingly, the main theme revolves around how innovation is becoming more open. There is a section that talks about open source software, highlighting IBM’s embrace of Linux, pointing out both the innovation opportunities and the competitive challenges open source introduces. We’ve been arguing for awhile that open source is the new paradigm for innovation. This Economist report is confirmation that this idea has become mainstream, and is expanding beyond software to include innovation across many industries, around the globe.