Oracle COREid Tidbits

Update (July 23, 2007)

My original page is getting dated — so instead of altering it, I will keep throwing new information up top.   Hopefully this will let you read as much or as little as is useful, getting the newest information first.

1) Naming:  Products are now named as follows:

• Oracle Access Manager (OAM):  this is the Oracle software, including what used to be COREid (the Oblix Identity Server).   I keep tripping up on this, calling the Oblix Identity stuff OIM, but that is not the correct name, AFAIK.
• Oracle Identity Manager (OIM):  this is the Thor stuff.
• Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD): this is the Octet stuff.
• Oracle Identity Federation:   I believe this is the Oblix Shareid Product.

2) Documentation:     Look here for version 10.1.4.

3) OBE:  Tutorials called “Oracle by Example” are available – look for Identity Management in this list, there are 2 different tutorials at this time.

4) Wondering how all these products fit together?   Read this :  Oracle Identity Management – Capabilities and Product Direction.

Note (Aug 15, 2006): new version of the IDM Suite is now available!! Details here…

Oracle’s Identity suite is very exciting! The products that are part of this suite (at least the ones that interest me) are:

• Xellerate – aquired from Thor
• COREid – aquired from Oblix
• OWSM (Oracle Web Services Manager) – aquired from Oblix who aquired it through Confluence (iirc)
• Virtual Directory – aquired from OctetString

The good news it that this is a spectacular set of functionality. The bad news is that you will NEVER FIND what you need on their godawful website. So – here is my “frequently wished for but rarely found” list:

Things to Remember:

• The product name is COREid. Don’t search for Oblix, don’t search for NetPoint.
• To my knowledge, the current COREid release is 7.0.4 – this comes across in Oracle-eze as 10g R2. There has been a new release — 10gR3 — but I have no idea whether there are any COREid upgrades in it, and I also don’t know how to find out. I’ll keep you posted.
• If you already own COREid, you have no choice but to spend the time to find out who the Oracle Administrator is for your company. Ask them for the following two things (trust me you need them):
  • Your Oracle Customer number
  • Your CSI number
• For some wacky reason, the COREid stuff is considered to be logically part of the Oracle Application Server. I know, that makes no sense, since the core service does not run in a container, and it is perfectly possible to run COREid and never have anything to do with the Application Server. Still, for browsing purposes, this information is CRITICAL.
• In spite of the fact that Oracle Corporate isn’t very clued in (imo), there are some brilliant and knowledgeable people both on the sales and the support side of things, who are focused on this product. If the website discourages you, post here and I will do my best to get you in touch with the right people. This is, of course, much easier to do for sales than for support.

Starting point:

Link to Oracle Access & Identity Home Page

Software Downloads

Link to Oracle 10g R2 Downloads page
(you have to have an OTN account to get here. And in order to get an OTN account you need to know your partner/customer number. Find that first and get an account, you can’t do much without it)

Documentation

New (Jan, 2007): Oracle Access Manager Benchmarking/Performance Whitepaper is here.

Oracle has just improved access to Identity-management-related documentation by a million percent. They now have a very nice starting page that you can go to to look around: http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B14099_19/idmanage.htm

The only thing about this page is that it SAYS it represents version 10.1.2 — but I have it on good authority that it really contains the latest & greatest, which is at this moment version 10.1.2.0.2. It isn’t optimal, because of course the next question is, what if I want to see the original version 10.1.2 documents???? And how do I know when exactly the knowledge management page changes to represent a new version? Still, kudos to Oracle for making such strides.

One other thing – if you want to see what all the different versions are, you can go to this link: http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/index.html. Under “Middleware” you will see all of the Oracle versions that might apply. Once you click on a version, go to the “View Library” and you should get to the nice front page for that version, at least for versions past 10.1.2. The best thing about these new front pages is that you can tell exactly what functionality each release contains, simply by looking at what tabs are represented at the top of the page. For example, if you go to the page for version 10.1.3, you can see there is no identity management link, and you can know for sure that there are no COREid pieces in that version.

As well, you can grab a nice compact zip of PDFs and know that you have them all together (thanks Michael, for pointing this one out): http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/ias/101202/as_coreid_ws_doc_101203.zip (link now fixed, thanks Fritz!)

Supported Platforms

Link to Oracle 10g R2 COREid/OWSM Certification for Oct 25, 2005

I have not figured out a way to traverse the Oracle.com website to find this document – but a Google search turned it up, believe it or not. This one is a GEM.

Discussion Forum

Link to Oracle Identity Management Forum

You can now get to this forum directly from the Oracle Identity Management home page (this is the easiest way to browse to the forum by far). If you were to try and get to the identity management forum through oracle.com, you would have to go to the main discussion forums page, and know to click the “more” link under “Application Server”. Intuitive, huh? After that, you get to see the list of all Application Server forums, one of which is “Identity Management”. The identity management forum has the following description:

This forum is for discussion of Oracle Identity Management components, including Oracle Internet Directory, OracleAS Single Sign-On, OracleAS Certificate Authority, Oracle COREid Access and Identity, Oracle COREid Federation, Oracle Xellerate Identity Provisioning, Oracle Virtual Directory, and Oracle Web Service Manager.

Yes, that’s right, eight programs on one forum. Brilliant. How easy to use…

Knowledge Base/Support

Link to Oracle Support Site (MetaLink)

The COREid knowledge base was shut down around June of last year, and all of sorts of problem histories and KB articles were lost to COREid admins. Why? WHY???? Oh the humanity… *sob*

Update: I hear that the knowledge base is back! Oracle has made good on their promise to make historical case information available.

So the METALINK account is different from the OTN account, different workflows, different reference number, and so on. Once you have it though, you have access to some pretty good info…

Mailing List

There used to be a very cool mailing list called NPTECH. Customers, Partners, and Oblix developers could collaborate on problems. Too bad Oracle shut that down too (yes, another brilliant marketing decision, they had a list of their most ARDENT customers, and they threw it away).

Oracle Blogs

Nishant Kaushik’s Identity Corner

Nishant is a very, very smart guy, it is always interesting to hear what he thinks….

For Partners

Turns out there is a part of the website that is devoted to partners – how nice! I wish it could be emailed to me, or that I could subscribe to it via RSS, or even that Oracle had told me that it existed in the first place – but hey, you can’t have everything. At least I know where it is now – and there is some great info there. I’m not sure if people out there who aren’t partners get access, and I can’t test it, so there you go.

Oracle Identity Management Partner News