Oh no, it's SSO

I don’t know when it happened precisely, but at some point my phone bill turned into a Frankenstein monster. I thought I’d picked a simple package, but after some back and forth with the phone company, managing options on a main (home) line and an additional home office line, I could no longer tell which options on my bill applied to which line. Expensing the office line has become a science project, and I found I’ve been paying way more than when I started, despite multiple negotiations to lower my monthly.

The last customer service guy I spoke to agreed that it’s nearly impossible to decipher the mess. And no, you CANNOT cherry pick your options. You have to pick a plan. You might three options from one plan and two from another, but it doesn’t work that way. The customer is not right.

I started feeling this way a while back about Oracle and SSO. The E Business Suite came bundled with OSSO for a long time. You can also use OAM 10g. A lot of EBS customers are on EBS r11, although there’s lots of encouragement to migrate to r12. Well, OSSO goes away, so you need OAM 11g. But r11 doesn’t like 11g, so you need 10g as a common denominator if you have both versions running in your enterprise, which a lot of people do while they’re migrating.

It sounds confusing, but at least you know that it WILL simplify as customers upgrade.

By the way, there is an EBS AccessGate. Now, the term AccessGate is an OAM thingy, but this isn’t exactly an OAM AccessGate. Even more confusing. The config for it can get pretty hairy too, so having a professional put that in place for you isn’t a bad idea.

And don’t forget that if you’ve been running OIM 9i with a third party (i.e. non-Oracle) SSO plug-in, and you upgrade to OIM 11g, you might be out of luck, since the standard for OIM SSO going forward is OAM.

This whole story will sort itself out, for sure, while I’[m positive that my phone bill will still suck ten years from now.