ForgeRock Professional Service

These days, when ForgeRock sells subscriptions, it has an option to purchase Professional Service as a bundle. Free or not? I'm not too sure. It's part of price negotiation, I believe. 

The ForgeRock Professional Service can be utilized as follows: 

I think the original intend is to get customers up-to-speed with Open Identity Stack (OIS) deployment. This is especially helpful/applicable to customers who are more technical-savvy and would like to deploy OIS by themselves. High-level Architecture Workshop will be helpful.

Now, what if a SI who is well-trained in OIS is involved?

Customers, being customers, will want to cut cost. Always.

The worst case scenario is for a customer to ask the SI to cut-off a few man-days from implementation cost, since the customer can utilize Product Specialist Field Assistance. Wow! Unbelievable, isn't it? Nay, this should not happen at all and it really doesn't make sense. If customer insists, I think the best way is to walk away.


I think this Professional Service should be best utilized in Production, especially On-Site troubleshooting and Performance Analysis. There will be situations (or there had been?) where a site is badly deployed by a so-so System Integrator (SI) and is now causing production issues. It would be real hard for support engineers to provide remote support. An on-site troubleshooting comes in handy.


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Open Identity Stack - Common Audit Framework

I'm looking forward to the Common Audit Framework in the next release of Open Identity Stack (OpenAM, OpenIDM, OpenDJ and OpenIG). 

At present, each component is logging in its own format and to different targets (e.g. file-system, database, syslog). Thus making debugging across components tedious.

This is definitely a good move!

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ForgeRock OpenIG - API Gateway

API Gateway is getting hot these days. In fact, within a span of 2 months, I have 3 potential customers asking for API Gateway solutions.

There are already a few API Gateway solutions out there in the market - namely CA API Management (aka Layer 7), Oracle API Gateway and Mulesoft API Manager.


Well, ForgeRock is now enhancing OpenIG to be a API Gateway!

* Slide extracted from the recent 2015 Identity Summit in US.

You can view the slides from The Platform Big Picture.


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OpenIG 3.0 Released

OpenIG has been quiet for a long while. The latest 3.0 version has just been released!

As organizations roll out new applications and APIs they need extremely agile ways of identity-enabling these services so they can expose them to the customer. Whether it be to offer more value to end-users or to monetize a new service, the ability to tie identity to these offerings is critical. With OpenIG, organizations can quickly identity-enable applications and APIs for roll-out and monetization.  

Key release highlights include: 

• Extends your authentication, authorization, and risk policies to mobile, cloud, and enterprise applications – without the need to change backend applications. 

• Integrates smoothly with existing, standards-based Identity Providers (e.g. OpenAM, SAML 2.0 IdP, Google OpenID Connect). 

• Protects machine-to-machine communications and API access, leading to immediate revenue opportunities.

See http://forgerock.com/products/open-identity-stack/openig/.


I thought no one is using OpenIG. The fact that ForgeRock invested time and resources into building Release 3.0 (Release Notes) proves that I'm wrong. :)

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