Epok Inc. introduced the new version of its Trusted Data Exchange (TDX) platform. With TDX version 4.1, Epok broadens the scope of its identity rights management platform to support BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 and BEA WebLogic WorkShop Controls, Microsoft's Visual Studio, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards -- Extensible Resource Identifier (OASIS XRI) 2.0 and J2EE.

"Identity management is going through a period of phenomenal growth due to the adoption of Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web services, pressures to reduce IT administrative overhead, concerns over expanding security risks and issues surrounding regulatory compliance," said Ayman Hariri, president and CEO of Epok. "At the same time, today's business climate demands increased interaction both internally and between external organizations, including the sharing of mission-critical information assets. Our identity rights management platform can help enable companies to manage large networks of complex business relationships without increasing administrative overhead, while reducing security gaps and retaining local control of resources."

The Epok TDX platform is designed to extend, leverage and bridge investments in current identity management environments, helping to enable both identity federation and policy federation to be managed within a common infrastructure. The TDX platform is also designed to provide a policy framework for securing internal and external SOA environments. By providing data-level control and accessing rights between identities, organizations can now for the first time enable disparate policy management solutions to interoperate, thereby taking trust beyond traditional boundaries.

"We're pleased that Epok is participating in the BEA Partner Program and has taken the important step of validating the Epok TDX with BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform," said Larry Aronovitz, director of the Worldwide Partner Program at BEA Systems. "BEA's validation program is designed to accelerate adoption of partners' solutions and increase market opportunities by assuring mutual customers that these partners' technology solutions integrate with the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform."

TDX 4.1 Key Enhancements

• OASIS XRI 2.0 Support -- Allows linked relations across trust domains to be located via XRI using unique names and identifiers.

• MS-Windows client libraries for Visual Studio -- Supports application development in non-Java methods with a set of client application libraries to improve application development on Windows- based platforms.

• Improved Message Quality of Service -- Enables TDX to distribute communications that are loosely coupled, reliable and asynchronous and supports message queue capabilities using the Java Messaging Service (JMS) standard to prevent message loss.

• TDX XQuery Service -- Provides a standard method to search across an XML identity document.

• Support for J2EE -- Provides additional support for more of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification enabling TDX to leverage existing and future J2EE capabilities, such as JMS, Java Connection Architecture, etc.

• Liberty ID-WSF Support -- The Epok Liberty module, which supports Liberty ID-WSF 1.1, is an add-on to the core TDX product that allows TDX to operate in a Liberty Circle of Trust. Web Service client applications will be able to authenticate to a Liberty IdP and provide the TDX with the authentication credentials generated by the IdP to access TDX services.