Although the phrase "Identity Management" has only gained traction recently, many of the technologies upon which it relies have been around for years or even decades. What follows is a list of identity management related milestones in CUIT history.

• cid, the "Columbia ID System", starts creating Unix accounts automatically, based on bubble cards.

• Work on flopsy, the never really completed successor to cid, begins.
• The freemail project is started to give free e-mail access to every one.

• CUCCA renamed to AcIS. (Academic and Administrative had split back in 1986.)

• Kerberos is deployed, providing the foundation for a single campus network ID.
• ph is deployed, providing directory services.

• The nightly batch job bigdaily is deployed, providing a unified view of student and personnel data for e-mail account provisioning.

• cheese, the University's first WebISO, is deployed, based on cookies and using ph and Kerberos.

• cheesewhiz, the University's first integrated Apache authentication module, is deployed.

• Initial ldap deployment.
• cheese is updated to use LDAP.
• nss_chpl provides Solaris 7 with account information via LDAP.
• pam_krb4 provides Solaris 7 with account authentication via Kerberos.

• cod, the University's second WebISO, is deployed.

• waffil enables distributed account provisioning.

• oil enables XML based application communication for Unix account information.
• wind, the University's third WebISO, is deployed.
• Participation in shibboleth takes root via NSDL.

• The next major ID system rewrite, samurai, begins.

• mod_auth_pamacea, the University's second integrated Apache authentication module, is deployed.

• Former AcIS Unix Systems Development Group spins off CUIT Identity Management Group.

A more general history is available here.