Symantec Siteminder Reviews

The flexibility; the multiple authentication schemes you can use; and the fact that you can use SiteMinder single sign-on to protect web services and web applications.

Customer support has been great too. CA has been good with my questions, getting us solutions for our two factor off, which we implemented a few years ago. They worked with us to get that rolled out. It's really flexible; and I think that's my favorite part.

We're able to have one single centralized way of logging in when you have shared sessions across all applications. It's flexible enough to have our two factor off implementation with it. It just makes things really easy for our users, both internal and external.

Like I said, it's pretty flexible. I mean it's met every one of our needs so far. We're currently looking to find ways of using the same authentication, which we've never actually used in it yet.

We're working with other companies now to provide federated authentication, both in and out. I will have to try that before I can say whether or not it's going to work. If it doesn't work, I think that's something we will have to explore with CA to find third-party alternatives, or something else in the future for enhancements.

I think SiteMinder's been perfectly stable. We just went through an upgrade about two years ago. We're still on SiteMinder, not SSO yet; so we still have another upgrade to do in the next year. It's been perfectly stable.

Our customer base is not the largest. It's probably about 10,000 right now. It's scaled fine. There's no problems there. I think we have room to grow if we need to. In terms of the number of applications we have thrown on there, it's grown pretty much exponentially since I started. No problems.

I've used technical support and I will say that I've said this to our sales rep a few times in the last two years, the customer support at CA has gotten so much better since I've started.

I used to get the runaround initially. They would ask us the same four questions all the time. I always felt like they were trying to brush me off and tell me “Go figure it out yourself” for the first few conversations.

For the past few years, it's been more like, "Okay, we know what you're on; we're tracking what you're doing; and we know that you're on this version and this version. How can we help?" It's more of a conversation, and that's great.

We converted from DMS, which was SiteMinder before CA bought it. I think it was relatively straightforward. From what I heard, there was a roles conversion process. We went from the old way of doing tasks to access roles. This required some work, but at that point, we didn't have that many web applications; so it wasn't a huge deal. It sounded like it was pretty smooth.

This solution is meeting our requirements for all of our applications. The newer version supports Grid Authentication.

This tool helps our organization with multiple applications. The solution is meeting the requirements and it is easy to use.

We are looking forward to implementing the uptime automation that was mentioned in the roadmap. We will go with the upgraded tool.

Once CA has finalized the cases that we have brought to them, it will be a better product to use.

In terms of stability, it’s good.

The scalability is good.

We have used technical support. We used them for a few cases we had during our upgrades. Anytime we need help with troubleshooting, we normally use support. We have spoken with them and they are good. They provide us with the proper solution for most things.

This is a product that I would recommend.

The most valuable feature for us is the configuration feature. It permits us to connect our company to the offices of our subsidiaries. So, when we buy a company we can connect their IT infrastructure to ours.

It connects us to our vendors, agencies, and our service providers that are within our group of subsidiaries. If we didn't use it or if we lost service for even two hours, we'd lose 20 million euros.

We'd like to see a new feature to support an openID connection portal. We'd also like for CA to be faster at shipping out new technical environments, such as OSs. They should do an operating system like RHEL, where Red Hat is on top the newest version of Linux. Today, they're slow to support new technology.

It's stable.

There have been no issues. The scale is very important for us because we are doing some new applications.

It's not user friendly, but it's very customizable. It's important to have customized developments integrated with CA SSO.

It's expensive. If you're small, it wouldn't be as good a fit, but if you are a big company, then it's a better choice.

• Security configuration
• Flexibility

It provides a secure interface and single sign-on to a variety of different applications.

It's difficult to configure, and has a very old and challenging user interface.

I managed it for approximately three years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's reasonable, the support does respond within a reasonable time frame, but it can be very difficult to troubleshoot any issue.

It's reasonable. The support is not the quickest to respond and does not have a mature process in terms of what logs must be gathered, and what to gather before raising a case.

It was complex. There are a number of concepts you have to understand to use the product, and the concepts are mostly specific to this particular product.

CA provided assistance with augmentation of the existing solution, they provided quite a good level of support during the project.

The client has a biometric identification module. We integrated that with the CA Single Sign On for new user registration, and it works perfectly fine for us.

It has considerably reduced the amount of time that new users would take to join into the organization. Previously, it was a lengthy, manual process because it's a very secure environment, where they need to verify the user before they can actually grant him a user-ID and password.

Integrating with the built-in custom application, and exposing CA Single Sign On to the internet, we were able to get the employees onboard. The time that we gained was: previously it would generally take from four to eight weeks for each employee, we brought it to one to two days.

The Federation part of Single Sign On, which is customizable and is easily integrated with any customer application or any third party application.

Maybe they could improve on the Federation part, and Federation with the apps. Not only for the websites, but with the apps also.

It's a very stable product.

Once we experienced a crash, the main policy engine of Single Sign On crashed, but CA gave us a fix for that.

Scalability-wise it's good. It's built into the product.

The support could improve in its response times, and in the understanding of the customers' problems.

It was complex. The Federation part of CA Single Sign On, it's a bit complex to implement because it involves the SSL certificates, exchange of certificates, and lot of technical details. The documentation misses some important parts of this, so that's the reason it took some time for us to go live.

When we're looking to select a vendor for a product, what's most important for a client like ours is the security; the product should be really secure. The next most important is the stability.

I rate it an eight out of 10 because, once we implemented it and the Federation part was working fine, we haven't faced any problems, except for that one instance where the policy was crashing.

I would definitely suggest going for CA Single Sign On.

Its flexibility and ease-of-use are the most valuable features.

The objects are tied together well in the administrator UI. It's flexible and easy to use, and the the policy store schema has been structured well.

It provides auditing and secure cookies, as well.

It provides security and protects end-applications. Auditing is good – it does a really good job of gathering all the transactional data. Anytime a user initiates a transaction, all of the information is captured.

It is very good. I have been working with the product for a very long time and have had no problems directly related to SiteMinder or its capabilities – only issues with our underlying infrastructure. There were a few things that CA has already addressed.

It scales very well. You can scale it horizontally or increase threads or socket configurations within the solutions.

They’re really good. Very knowledgeable. I had a policy store corruption – they were able to help me fairly quickly, in a reasonable time.

I’ve been doing it for a long time, I can say it's medium-level complexity. The policy store configuration, and tuning the policy store is a bit complex in ensuring it does not corrupt.

It is easy to implement, use, and scale. There is room for improvement as with any product. It’s solely based on what their requirements are, their user population, and their enterprise environment.

It is reliable.

I do not think there is anything to improve. It is a pretty complete product.

We are using it as we have implemented it. I have not seen anything that is missing.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

The tech support has not been very good for us so we don't use them anymore. We have had some issues. Nobody is perfect.

It was a long time ago, but we stopped using them because of it. It was very long time ago. It might be better now, but it used to not be so good. Now, we solve problems in another way.

We started to use the product before it was CA. It used to be another company's product. CA bought the company a couple of years ago. I do not remember who it was actually.

It provides good security as a single sign-on tool and is easy to integrate with various applications. Also, the admin UI it provides is very user-friendly.

It provides end users with SSO to our applications – they log in once and they can access all of our applications. It’s simpler, more secure, and involves less time for the end users, giving them a better experience with us.

I'd like to see authentication using biometrics. This would be a nice addition.

Although the policy server has sometimes spontaneously restarted, it’s mostly good.

It’s scalable; you can add new servers and away you go. If we add more users or more load, it’s easy to scale up.

They are very helpful – always there when we need them. We had a problem with their impersonation solution with our application. It was not working with the existing version, so we called them and they determined the right solution was to downgrade.

We also have support tickets for other CA products and they are very responsive – on time and are helpful.

It was already in production when I joined the company.

It provides a good UI for us, and it provides a good solution for our needs. As a standalone product, it's good.

You should understand the user setup, requirements, how you want to service the users, and their infrastructure. Based on this information, you can find the right solution.