a new SPML? a provisioning problem.

Originally posted on identitysander on WordPress: a new SPML? a provisioning problem.. This Ghost site is now the canonical home for this material. But you should only go to see it there if you want a laugh about how silly websites looked then. It's a time capsule now.

Mark Diodati of Gartner (that was a bit hard to type right the first time) has published the results of the SPML SIG held at #cat10. I think it captures the feeling of those present very well. At about the same time the minutes of the first meeting of the SPML PSTC for a long while were published. It seems there's a much different split there than there was at the SIG. The split is basically between folks who want to see a "clean start" with a version 3 and those who want to see version 2 revved so it's more realistic. I'm on the latter side, and so are the folks at Quest that I've spoken to. In fact, both and Quest and at customers, everyone I've spoken to about this outside a tight circle of "identity gurus" have all agreed that SPML would best serve the larger community as means to have systems communicate. Anything beyond that is overkill. At least for now. If all the different solutions had a standard way to do CRUD operations between one another, that would go a long way to solving many practical issues in heterogeneous IT environments.

I'd like to get more involved and I'm working with Quest to see if that can happen. This is something I'd like to see done from start to end.