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Home : History
The development of View500 began in 1989 at the Telstra Research
Laboratories in Melbourne, Australia, to meet Telstra's organisational
requirements for a corporate electronic directory. The development
was led by Rolf Exner and Dr Stephen Legg then at the forefront
in the development and design of the global ISO X.500 standard.
As part of this development Telstra built into the directory solution
a set of sophisticated search capabilities designed to make the
implementation extremely easy to use by any web or windows user
providing support for approximate matching on a search request,
including phonetic matching and spelling correction, truncation
matching, abbreviations, keyword matching, synonyms, and any combinations
of these requests.
In 1999, a licence to exploit the View500 (now known as View500) software was granted to Adacel Technologies Ltd by Telstra. Acacel continued the development of View500 adding native support for LDAP v2 and v3.
In 2004 eB2Bcom Australia's leading identity management solution provider, acquired Adacel's View500 business, which included licences to exploit Telstra's and Adacel's IP, the customer base and the development and support teams from Adacel. In 2008 eB2Bcom went onto to acquire Adacel's IP on the View500 product. Since acquisition of View500 in 2004, eB2Bcom has continued to develop and maintain the View500 product whilst maintaining an active role in the LDAP, PKIX and XED (XML Enabled directory) standards advancements. Since 2004, eB2Bcom has added a whole range of new features and facilities to the product - not least the ability to store XML objects and schema in the Directory and to provide for searching, using Component matching, any directory data including XML objects. Telstra also remains a key user of the product.
A major new version of View500 (View500) - Version 7 with a lot of new features
and capabilities is due to be released in May 2009. Many of these
features are improvements in the way View500 is configured, set
up, implemented, deployed and accessed.
View details of the released versions below:
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All
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Version 6.0
The current version for View500 is View500 Release 6.0 Patch 6e11
which was released on 17th March 2009 and Version 6.0.0.9 for the View500
DUA (Directory User Agent).
Click here to see the features of the current release.
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Version 5.3
Version 5.3 became available on the 15th of November, 2002.
This release included enhancements to the security of passwords within the directory.
Value hashing
View500's proprietary value hashing scheme was implemented into the directory. This
value protection scheme is a configurable policy that can be used to protect passwords
when they are stored into and returned out of the directory.
The password values can be protected by a range of hash algorithms.
When a password is in a hashed format it can be safely returned out of the
directory over insecure channels. This is due to the fact that it becomes
cryptographically infeasible for an attacker to obtain the user's cleartext
password from a hashed version.
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Version 5.2
Version 5.2 of View500 became available on the 25th of June, 2002.
Tree Browsing
This version of View500 saw the WebDUA get a facelift to illustrate new functionality.
The major upgrades included new graphics and Tree Browsing functionality. The WebDUA
now allows user's to navigate through the Directory Information Tree via a graphical interface.
LDAP Enhancements
In the DSA Server, additional portions of the LDAP specification were implemented. Such features include:
* LDAP Controls.
Controls are defined as part of the LDAP standard and can be used to convey
additional information or functionality through the existent LDAP protocol. Newly supported controls included:
# Server Side Sorting Control
This control allows LDAP clients to request that the DSA sort search results before returning them.
# Paged Search results Control.
This control can be used by clients to instruct the DSA server to only return a subset
(whose size is specified by the client) of results. The client is then able to repeat
the request and get the next set of results at its leisure.
# Proxied Authorization Control.
This control allows an LDAP Client to perform LDAP operations on behalf of other users.
This is useful when applications manage their own user authentication, and would like
to act on the user's behalf to access the directory.
# LDAP Password Policy Control.
When an LDAP Password Policy is being applied within the directory, this control can
be used to convey information from the DSA to the user. Such information may include
the amount of time that a user has left before they must change their password.
* LDAP Extension - Transport Layer Security.
This extended operation provides additional security for LDAP connections.
* LDAP Password Policy.
This standards based feature allows an administrator to specify password
policies for password attributes. This policy is highly configurable and
allows the adminstrator to enforce an appropriate level of password security
to reduce the possibility of a secrity breach due to password compromise.
* Chaining LDAP Operations
Leveraging off the X.500's distribution protocols, the DSA is now able to
convert an LDAP request into DAP and distribute the operation to other DSA's.
This mechanism allows an LDAP client to interact more fully within an X.500
distributed environment.
AdminDUA
The AdminDUA was enhanced to allow access control information to be imported
and exported from the directory. Once exported, access control information
can be easily imported from a file. This saves time, since making the
configuration via a GUI can be by-passed.
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Version 5.1
View500, Version 5.1, was released on the 25th of July 2001.
Native LDAP
This was the first version of View500 that contained native LDAP support.
Removing the need for an X.500/LDAP gateway, Native LDAP provided performance
and reliability benefits for View500.
LDAP Data Interchange Format
LDIF, the LDAP Data Interchange Format, also became supported. This allowed
View500 to bulk-load large volumes of data in an efficient manner, which
is especially useful for loading information from other directories.
OpennSSL Enhancements
The security of directory information, whilst in transmission, was increased
with the support for LDAP over SSL. OpenSSL libraries being used by View500
were updated to support SSLv3 and TLSv1, in addition to the already existent SSLv2.
Other security enhancements included the support for securely retrieving passwords
from the directory. This feature allowed password values to be obtained from
the directory in a hashed format.
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Version 4.7
On the 30th of October 2000, Adacel released the 4.7 version of View500.
24 x 7
In 4.7, the DSA became capable of continuous operation, 24 hours a day,
7 days a week. The DSA no longer required a routine shutdown when various log files became too large.
GUI Enhancements
Version 4.7 included changes to the GUI's which allowed them to provide the following functionality:
* Anonymous Browsing
* Increased control over the configuration of Access Control
Various bug fixes, made to the DSA, PDUA, WebDUA, SDUA, VFLOAD, AdminDUA, LDAP
gateway, VTDUA and WinDUA were all bundled into the 4.7 release.
The LDAP-API component of View500 was deprecated from the 4.7 release.
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