This Thing is OFF (in a good way). BONUS: Catalyst SPML SIG

blogger: Bob Blakley

Pam recently asked "is this thing on?"  We have indeed been pretty quiet; the combination of preparing for two Catalyst conferences, migrating from Burton's IT infrastructure to Gartner's, doing three months' work in a two-month quarter (we've realigned our content quarters with Gartner's schedule), and searching for a replacement for our fearless former leader Gerry Gebel have kept us pretty busy.

But that's all behind us now, and I'm happy to be able to report that, as of today, the answer to Pam's question is "NO, this thing is NOT on. THAT OTHER THING is on."

We've just finished the process of integration into the Gartner IT systems, and as part of that we're moving, effective immediately, to the Gartner Blog Network.

Each IdPS analyst will now be publishing on his or her own page rather than as an aggregated service blog.  You can find me here (posts coming shortly!) and the rest of us will be up & running very soon.

I've already sent Pat a request to add us to Planet Identity, so all you feed freaks can get your fix in the usual place. The rest of you should update your blogrolls and bookmarks.

We'll leave you with an invitation and a parting gift. Here's the invitation: if you want to know what we've been doing in our quiet time, join us at Catalyst Europe and Catalyst North America. We've got a lot of exciting material to talk about. (If you've heard from a shadowy source that Catalyst Europe was cancelled, you know who's worried about competing with us :-)

Here's the gift: a parting entry from Mark Diodati.

blogger: Mark Diodati

Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) Special Interest Group at Catalyst

As you may recall, Burton Group has been closely tracking the SPML v2 standard and its adoption by the industry and the enterprise prior to its approval in early 2006. We have called the standard’s viability into question via our recent blog entries (SPML Is On Life Support and SPML: Life Support Redux) and our research document OASIS or Mirage: Standards-Based Provisioning (client subscription required). Since our “Life Support” blog entry, other folks in the industry have contributed to the discussion about SPML’s future, including Jeff Bohren (Whither SPML or wither SPML? and SPML 3.0 in 3D!!!), John Fontana (SPML 3.0. Coming next week to a TC near you?), Anil John (Standards Based Provisioning and SPML and SPML Use Cases and Profiling Choices), Nishant Kaushik (SPML Under The Spotlight Again?), and Jackson Shaw (SPML – Not dead yet!). We are very pleased to have Anil and Nishant speaking at our Catalyst NA conference in San Diego this summer as part of our New Identity Architecture track.

In the spirit of our conference name (and the fact that the conference is the most important identity conference on the planet, where the identerati converge for a week), we will be hosting an SPML special interest group (SIG) on July 27 (Tuesday) for a few hours in the early afternoon. Anil, Nishant, Patrick Harding (Ping Identity), Nick Nikols (Novell) and other additional industry luminaries will be participating. I will be hosting the SIG. We want to conclude the meeting with the answers to at least several questions:

• What is wrong with SPML v2 today?
• What should the next version or profile of SPML look like?
• If deficiencies are corrected, will people use the next version of SPML?

We’re looking for a few more people to participate in the SIG, especially from the enterprise. Are you interested? If so, please send me a few sentences about your background, your experience with provisioning services, and why you would like to participate.

Comments

[Pamela Dingle]

Do I have to add the entire Gartner blog network to my feed reader, or is there a BurtonGroup tag that I can use to find Burton Group specific content?

ps - thanks for closing this feed off, it's nice to have a bit of closure there :)

pps - nice to have you back...

Pamela