Hello RIT,
You also touched on another good technical subject here ... and a good philosophical debate ...
> If Novell is still funding digitalme, eDirectory 8.5
> offers the chance to link directories together via
> Federation. So you are defined in one directory, but can
> be allocated rights in others. Just think of it as the old
> NT domain structure, but for 10,000,000s of users, with a
> digitalme acting as the 'root' and other companies linking
> to it.
There are a couple of lines of thought in these types of architecture ... centralized and decentralized (distributed). What you are alluding to is a centralized model, where federation "solves" some fo the issues of having numerous user objects ... but also creates some problems in extended identity information storage.
In a decentralized, or distributed, model you get to use "client-side federation" to create a similar model. The "client" creates and maintains the federation that it wants to exist.
I see some value in centralized federation, but due to general philosophical reasoning, I do not believe that centralized solutions scale, adapt, nor survive.
This is why Personal Directory will become *so* key to the future ... it is the beginning of personal identity storage and client-side federation capabilities.
Think of billions of Personal Directories providing federation into billions of other directories ... a nice market to attack! ;-)
Scott C. Lemon |
