Ask and ye shall receive. The other day, I lamented that it seemed like nothing interesting was happening outside of OpenID. Nearly instantaneously the Higgins 1.0 release happened (very interesting), and now the Bandit project has gone and done something exceedingly interesting. They've written connectors to extend IdM functionality to help manage all of the systems in a hotel.
Quoting:
Most hotels have as many as 100 systems, such as phone, heating and point-of-sale systems, spread across many locations with individual administrative accounts, making it difficult to effectively audit and monitor the entire operating environment. By using the Bandit project's reference code to connect all these different systems to readily available identity management software, enterprises can maintain compliance with industry regulations, lower administrative costs and significantly reduce the time required to provision, administer and pass audits.
"As a global leader in hospitality and food service, Delaware North Companies has operations in hotel, retail, food service, recreation and transportation," said Yvette Vincent, director of Applications at Delaware North Companies. "With the Bandit Project's connectors and the proposed HTNG standard we will be able to utilize Novell Identity Manager to automate, monitor and control access to our systems from one central location, as well as streamline the process of auditing our IT infrastructure, making it easier to prove compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) and other regulatory requirements. This technology gives companies the ability to greatly improve the quality of user access management, with a greater degree of efficiency as well."
Set aside the Novell PR pitch for one second, and you're left with an IdM implementation that not only provides security, but provides compliance and cost savings (and PCI compliance and auditability) on a *massive* scale. Even if its just reference code, the idea itself is the kind of thing the identity industry needs to see.
Bravo.
