Novell releases Identity Manager 3

Computerworld - Novell Inc. today will release Identity Manager 3, which it said will speed up the process of managing employee passwords and user access rights inside the corporate network by moving that function away from the IT department.
"IT people are not the people who know who should have access to things," said Ferris Argyle, product manager for the Identity Manager software.
Version 3 automates the process of approving rights and empowers business managers to make changes to usage rights for employees working for them, the Waltham, Mass.-based company said in a statement.
To balance out the fact that more company employees are able to change user rights, the upgrade includes tighter auditing features to track who makes what changes.
Identity Manager, which Argyle said competes mostly with products from Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM, also offers real-time synchronization of user access rights across the network.
Identity Manager 3 costs $75,000 per installation and $25 per user. A provisioning module costs an additional $30,000 per installation and $10 per user.
Novell declined to say how many Identity Manager users it has today. When it released Version 2 of Identity Manager, previously known as DirXML, in January 2004, Novell said it had 1,400 customers at the time.

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