The renamed product features enhanced provisioning,
metadirectory and password management, as well as browser-based configuration and a more intuitive interface.
Microsoft Corp used Catalyst 2002 to lay out plans for identity management announcing Microsoft
Metadirectory Services 3.0, which was last week released to manufacturing as Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003, and Trustbridge, which has yet to appear.
In a bid to overcome the sign-on problem, some organisations have chosen to consolidate user directories with '
metadirectory' technologies from companies such as Novell; others have gone a step further, implementing identity management software from companies such as Netegrity and Oblix to create a single pan-enterprise username and password; others have outsourced the entire process to companies such as US-based Access360.
The main differences revolve around how this part of the systems work, with options ranging from full replication between multiple master metadirectories to schemes that use a single master
metadirectory that catches all writes, then updates multiple slaves.
