Nice post on OES 10g vs 11g

I have started a discussion in linkedin to find out the documentation/thoughts on OES 11g and 10g comparison with respect to features like authorization and role policy models, export and import XMLs and so on.

Matthew carter has pointed out a good post on comparing OES 10g with OES 11gR2.
I'll supplement this post with some more thoughts soon here.

Updates on OES 11g with Java SM in Tomcat Server

Earlier I had written my comments about OES 11g with java SM in Tomcat container in this post. I'd like to redefine this with some changes.

First of all, OES 11.1.1.5.0 is not supported on Tomcat Server 6.x. However if your client have no choice other than using Tomcat and there is an application to be protected against OES 11g, then here is what you can do:

Assuming that OES server and client + Java SM is installed and up and running.

• Goto Tomcat install directory, edit the setclasspath.sh or setclasspath.bat and update the Tomcat Classpath with oes-client.jar as export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:$OES_CLIENT_HOME/modules/oracle.oes.sm_11.1.1/oes-client.jar.
• Specify the Java SM jps-config.xml in the Java OPTIONS (in the same file setclasspath.sh or setclasspath.bat) as export JAVA_OPTS= $JAVA_OPTS -Doracle.security.jps.config=$OES_CLIENT_HOME/oes_sm_instances//config/jps-config.xml.

Test the Tomcat application with some authorization policies and it works!

Exceptions: In my case, our enterprise application was using xml parser jars which was conflicting with xmlparserv2.jar located under $OES_CLIENT_HOME/modules/...

Experiences of Oracle Entitlement Server 11g Java SM

Since 2 months I have had the opportunity to work on Oracle Entitlement Server 11g on various requirements and would like to put my experiences here.

Java SM: The Java SM instance creation is very simple using a command line script with few input parameters. All this SM requires is the jps-config.xml present in $JAVA_SM/config location. The contents of this XML would be identity store, policy store, credentials store and so on. I am not going into details of the backend stores specified in this XML. You can use Java SM to execute java code on a stand-alone mode. There is an application Server JBOSS which is supported (atleast the steps are known to the world - detailed in fusionsecurity.blogspot.com). However if you want to use Java SM in the famous Tomcat container, then it is not supported in this current release which I think is very big lag. In general there are two types of calls you can make out to OES 11g - Authorization Calls, Policy Management calls.

In our case, we have developed an enterprise application and deployed in Tomcat container. We have to make authorization calls from the application in a dynamic manner for protecting the fine grained elements. We have tried N no. of ways to achieve this but could not make it work. However we are able to make policy management calls to OES Server just using jps-config.xml file. Policy Management calls include creating applications, resources, policies etc.,

Attended a session on Oracle Entitlement Server 11g

Further to previous posts on OES 11g, I had attended a session today given by Oracle Product Manager. Some of the key points that I would like to outline are:

1. OES 11g can be integrated with OAM 11g out of the box and is certified - this is very good news. In previous versions of OAM and OES, we used custom approach by using specific Authentication schemes in applications protected by OES etc., It was not pretty straight forward.
2. OES 11g provides very good authorization security for Oracle Database. In future we can expect that Database comes up with OES by default.
3. OES 11g can be implemented in Cloud Security which is the hot requirement for most of the customers now.
4. OES 11g is certified with OID 11g. 
5. There is no direct integration of OES 11g with either OAAM 11g or OIF 11g. However it can be implemented using customization.
6. Auditing and Reporting has been enhanced.
7. OES 11g Admin consoles are Web UI consoles.
8. OES 11g can be used for multi-tenancy. Future releases directly supports multi-tenancy.
9. Future releases of OES 11g (probably by end of 2011) we may expect this product to integrate with SOA and Fusion Middleware products out of the box.

 This is it for today!!

OES 11g is launched

Much awaiting product Oracle Entitlement Server 11g is launched by Oracle. I am going to attend a Web Session on OES 11g. I will keep updated with the findings soon.

OES 11g Installs and documentation links are provided in this post

Keep watching this space.