Internal and External Uses of SPML

[Gary Cole <Gary.P.Cole@Sun.COM>]

Felt compelled to write a paper (attached), but you guys already know this stuff, so the short version follows:

This paper contrasts internal provisioning (e.g., for employee identities) with external provisioning (e.g., for customer identities), and suggests that each presents different requirements for SPML.  

External provisioning  is relatively simple, since external applications are generally well-defined and few choices are exposed.  Where a request crosses an enterprise boundary, only minimal data flows with it.  Since most of the details are implicit, protocol operations must be explicit, must work with minimal data, and should minimize schema dependencies.

Internal provisioning exposes more of the systems infrastructure, many choices, and many more subtleties.  Enterprises use SPML to standardize integration between components of a complex provisioning process, and to ease migration. Internal provisioning requires greater richness of representation, and precise handling of complex objects.

That's the net of the whole six pages.

Gary

Internal and External Uses of SPML.doc