Identity Integration: SMS Gateways and Fax Gateways

Integrating Fax and SMS Gateways into Identity Management Infrastructures

We were recently contacted by a UK-based organisation with an extremely large workforce and directory implementation of nearly 2 million user objects. This organisation obviously has a considerable requirement for managing their distribution lists but threw us a bit of a curve ball by also telling us that they wanted to incorporate Fax and SMS gateway users into their distribution list management architecture and could we provide assistance or advice?


They had come up against the usual Fax and SMS gateway issues as everyone else, and it was causing them a major headache - when adding an object to a distribution list, the object itself is added but the only value that is actually used by the DL is the primary address value. Therefore a user or contact object can have an email address, a fax gateway address and an SMS gateway address, but the only value which is used by the DL is the primary value, typically the email address, other wise there would be all sorts of issues!

Of course, there is no way around this DL architecture requirement, or at least not at first sight, but with a bit of work and thought, we have designed a series of connectors in Novell's Identity Manager and also incorporated Imanami's SmartDL to produce an excellent response to this problem.

We are planning to share this technology with our clients, so if you are interested in incorporating automated distribution lists into fax and SMS gateway solution and wish to manage the whole object lifecycle, please let us know so we can show you how it's done!