Among the many issues that will take center stage in the arena of real-time collaboration tools is the one of security and identity management.

Though many companies boast security features such encryption, SSL and password protected online meeting rooms, most are really not yet realizing that what we have been securing so far are only the documents that we are sending to each other, as well as the video, audio and traffic data exchanged during these conversations.

But does this provide us with true security?

How do we know that the person we are talking to online is the person she claims to be and that the document she is sending us is not altogether a fake?

You can encrypt your room to 1024-bit and still get advice about your stock investment from a fake stock analyst.

Password protecting your online shared space does not make a false doctor or lawyer any more reliable or secure to deal with.

As we gradually move our daily activities, affairs and business to the online world we will inevitably have to deal with these issues, as, them being a problem in physical reality already, they can only get worse in a scenario where it is hard to tell who is who from webcam looks and voice tone alone.

The issues of identity is further exacerbated by the fact that mobile communications are going to heavily disrupt our present IT infrastructure, which is all based on a reference to a specific computer not to the identity of the person using it.

But as individuals start to engage in their online interactions through cellphones, PDAs, portable PCs, softphones and other mobile communication tools what is going to happen to your identity online?

Can we really accept to have an identity management authority like Microsoft PassPort which keeps all of our identities on Microsoft own corporate information servers?

Infoworld columnist Carlton Vogt noted:

"We have to steer a course between two equally distasteful possibilities. Either people will know too little about us or ... or they will know too much and leave us with no privacy at all."
Source: "Personal knowledge: do we know too much or too little?" Ethics Matter by Carlton Vogt, Infoworld, February 13, 2001

The issue of mobility and its relationship to identity management cannot be stressed enough:

"Mobility is not an add-on to existing architectures: It is a profound disruption. Enterprises that ignore the impact of mobility on their software architectures are setting themselves up for accelerating software maintenance costs.

In all the generations of IT architecture to date, there has been one constant - the entities that are lined by the architectures are computers. Mobility creates new rules - now the architecture must link the user of the systems. Of course we always talked about users, but in practice the computers stood as proxies for the users.

In a world where I have multiple devices, with very different capabilities, and I wish to move seamlessly from performing functions on one device to performing functions on another, how do the systems react?

By logging me off one machine because I have logged on somewhere else (such as my cellular phone)?

By breaking my connection and freezing my applications because I have moved between a wireless LAN and a cellular service?

By sending me a 1024x768 display complete with scroll bars so I can view it all on my handheld device 320x200 pixels at a time?

Mobility and device diversity require a new layer in the architecture. Worst of all, the "enterprise architecture" now becomes hopelessly polluted, since it spans enterprise systems, carriers and devices that the enterprise does not control."
Source: Gartner's Strategy & tactics/Trends and Direction; Note: COM-16-7718 July 2002, S. Hayward copyright (c) Gartner 2002

As we start to familiarize ourselves with this new online reality we better start to ask ourselves some serious questions as to how we think is best that we manage this important issues.

Unless we want to leave it to technologists, to decide how our intellectual property and personal identities should be managed and secured in our future online collaboration spaces.

The future is open for us to choose who will control your and my identities.

The time is now to start asking the right questions.