No doubt: There is certainly a significant amount of hype around Identity Management these days. It is one of the most mentioned topics in security-related IT magazines, websites and conferences. And the reason is simple: As companies move toward Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Identity Management plays a critical role in securing access to applications as well as access to the services themselves. With SOA, applications typically require to access identity data within and beyond the organization's boundaries over standard protocols.
This is where the Common Standards - Security - Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) comes into play: A proven industry standard, ratified by OASIS, and supported by many vendors and platform, including SAP NetWeaver. SPML helps to automate the steps required to manage (create, amend, and revoke) user or system access entitlements, aka Identity Provisioning. De-provisioning, such as when an employee leaves a company, is done by closing access accounts. In this context, SPML defines the concepts and operations of an XML-based provisioning request-and-response protocol.
In my one-hour lecture, you'll get an in-depth insight into SPML and you'll learn how you can use it to streamline your identity business processes. Here is the list of topics I'll cover in my session:
- Identity Management: A short primer
- The role of SPML in Identity Management
- SPML in SAP NetWeaver
- Get your hands dirty: Coding an SPML Client
- Live Demo: Using the SPML Interface
As you can see from the agenda, I'll conclude the session with a live demo that shows how to code an SPML client application that performs certain identity management functions using the SPML interface in SAP NetWeaver. The client will utilize an open source library, OpenSPML, to create SPML requests and parse the responses received from SAP NetWeaver AS Java.
If you want to learn more on Identity Management and SPML, I'd be happy to welcome you in my session and recommend the following readings:
SAP PRESS book "The Developer's Guide to SAP NetWeaver Security", which includes a chapter on Identity Provisioning (
german edition available in October 07,
english edition available in April 2008)
