Action Identity Blog

Lately, we’ve been covering many of the Oracle (formerly Passlogix V-GO) Enterprise Single Sign-On products on this blog. The ESSO market is healthy with competition, and we’ve been looking at different products available to consumers.  One product that has gained our attention is the Novell Secure Login ESSO solution.

Secure Login interfaces with the three main types of applications:  Windows based, web based, and mainframe-emulation based.  This product uses LDAP communication in order to communicate with its main repository, meaning it maintains a rather flexible list of available repositories to choose from (Active Directory, ADAM, eDirectory, or Sun Java Directory to name a few).

The installation procedure for the product was fairly straight forward.  Whereas the Oracle ESSO-LM requires two primary installs (The LM Agent and the Administrative Console), the Novell product requires a one-time use executable, which automatically extends the schema and assigns the user-rights, and the SecureLogin Agent.

The SecureLogin agent starts up automatically upon login.  Novell Secure Login (NSL) does allow you to configure user authentication with a wide range of methods (Windows login, LDAP, and various forms of Strong Authentication, just to list a few).

Displayed above is the NSL Agent when it is expanded.  By default, Novell SecureLogin stores the templates configured by users under their own respective encrypted data object.  This allows users that utilize NSL to customize each login to their own personal taste (i.e. automatic submission, or username injection only).  The agent also allows users to access and modify their logins, alter the default SecureLogin preferences, and even create customized password policies.

Unlike the Oracle ESSO-LM Agent, the NSL Agent allows you to create and customize templates for applications (Remember, the Oracle ESSO Administrative Console is used for template creation).  SecureLogin takes you step by step through the process, presenting a list of actions to take.  In our next example, we’ll take the second selection, ‘Yes, I want to single sign enable the screen using the wizard.’

The screen above is the template creation wizard, and as you can see from the credential source tab, the process is very straight forward.  The Novell SecureLogin wizard takes users step-by-step through the process, asking them questions about every aspect of the application.  The creation process is simplified to the point that a novice computer user could create a Single Sign-On template with ease.

On a strong, final note, Novell’s product offers something unique to advanced users:  The ability to edit the script for templates.  This option alone allows for complete customization of a template, and opens the doors to many possible utilizations of the Novell SecureLogin product.

I hope you have enjoyed learning about Novell SecureLogin, if you find have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you. To learn more about Action Identity and our portfolio of identity management solutions, visit our website. If you’d like contact us directly, please click here. 

To learn more about Oracle and Novell: 
http://www.actionidentity.com/blog/post.cfm/novell-cloud-security-systems
http://www.actionidentity.com/blog/post.cfm/oracle-enterprise-single-sign-on-lm-an-overview
http://www.actionidentity.com/blog/post.cfm/oracle-access-manager-11g-oracle-s-latest-web-single-sign-on-sso-offering
http://www.actionidentity.com/blog/post.cfm/what-version-of-novell-identity-manager-4-is-right-for-me-advanced-edition
http://www.actionidentity.com/blog/