eRights - Unified Access & Concurrency Control for IT Products

We might have used Lightweight Directory Access Protocol [LDAP] used to control user authentication and entitlements for enterprise applications. 

Albeit open source ldap can fulfill extensive access control mechanism complex entiltments for enterprises, it potentially lacks concurrency enforcement for which many of us, would have employed other custom solutions [like tracking session id/access id with respect to application usage etc]

eMeta attempts to bridge the gap between access & concurrency controls through its unified approach via its eRights suite.

The product description goes as below.....

"eRights is an enterprise-information commerce software package for the online 

information industry. It provides authentication, access control, concurrency control. 

It helps IT product enterprises to  implement sophisticated personalized licenses 

and allow organizations to extract products from large databases of information.

eRights directly addresses the problems of selling and distributing information 

online by recognizing that information products are built from elements of 

content and application services that can be packaged in different ways to 

address different markets. eRights optimizes the many paths and usage terms and 

makes user, access, and product information available to other components of 

content distribution systems, such as personalization and content management 

software, content protection technologies, and payment systems."

Lets analyze a custom implementation on eRights :-

Resource 

The bottom of hierarchy starts with resource - that can have id and name. This is atomic unit of access control that can be devised. 

Product

The set of resources are grouped together and called a product - this can be real world business entity. 

User

This represents individual user / role that can access the product. Apart from regular name, id, password,  details it can also store as much customer info as possible.

Group

The set of users - called as Group that represents a team/organiztion unit/ a department etc.

Other than individual user access - group login/password also can be configured. 

License

The users and/or groups are assigned a product or set of products with set of rules governing validity time period, trial/preferred access, concurrent usage, number of logins etc which is called Licensing.

Concurrency Maintenance:

When a user logs in, an eRights session can be tied with the user record which can keep track of concurrency. 

Programming interfaces:

eRights offers application programming interfaces for many standard programming languages [Java, .Net, Perl etc] which enables application developers seamlessly integrate eRights into their application suite.

Conclusion

Concurrency control is certainly a step ahead on product marketing and its worth to consider unified solutions like eRights.

More info: 

http://www.emeta.com