We have received several queries about the status of our Site Authentication Manager, and wanted to update everyone with respect to the latest movement on this codebase.

Shortly after announcing the impending Alpha release of Site Authentication Manager, we aquired a sponsor who asked us to rescope the project. Our new sponsor is a technology company who wanted to make a contribution to the open source/free community and had use for the newly scoped project. We are pleased to Welcome REVShare (an industry leader in CPA television advertising) to our project.

Originally planned to do nothing more than correlate users and sessions between multiple third party applications (we had this working on several websites), we were now being asked to integrate a page rendering and permission (role based - we were dreaming of taking that one on already) framework into the existing codebase.

This lead to discussions about refactoring, then redesigning from the ground up for the entire code base. This has been a major rewrite and we are now approaching an Alpha release again, expected to be shortly after the first of 2007 (sometime in first quarter).

SAM has always been an acronym for Site Authentication Manager, and with the rescope it seemed appropriate to re-evaluate how we were labeling this codebase

Since we were really now looking at providing an integration framework, we decided to call it that. We spent a few days searching for a recognizable unused name (try that one!) and came up with Maguey, a spanish word for a plant/cactus of the genus Agave.

With a name in place, we are now changing the project name to Maguey (Maguey Integration Framework or MIF) and the team's name to Maguey Code Team. We have registered appropriate domain names, magueyif.org and magueyif.com and are now proceeding with the processing of getting our house in order.

We plan to setup and utilize a Subversion repository, a trouble ticket system, a support forum, a relevant content manager, and php Documentor documentation at magueyif.org, which at this moment is not yet functional.

We sincerely thank everyone who has participated for their support, and look forward to getting this project out and released sometime mid next year. It is going to solve a lot of problems for web administrators who wish to install and use best in class applications on their websites while retaining a singular user database (and thus login and session).

Please stay tuned, we will be announcing more as it becomes available!!