Out of the venerable Interop Conference in Las Vegas comes word that Microsoft is expanding its effort to promote identity management system interoperability. Included are some related open-source software offerings that are hosted on RubyForge.org and SourceForge.NET.

Microsoft is making an Identity Selector Interoperability Profile available under an Open Specification Promise (OSP). Last September,  the company announced the availability of 38 Web services specifications under the OSP. A subset of those specifications, such as WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation, address identity ‘metasystem’ scenarios.

Three core elements make up the identity metasystem: the people who are presenting their identity, the Web site or online service requesting proof of identity, and the identity providers who assert some information about those people, according to the company.

At the heart of the effort is JInformationCard, aimed at developing a platform independent plugin for Java-based web application servers to tap into Microsoft InformationCard functionality.

Microsoft is starting four  projects for Web developers interested in using information cards as the primary mechanism for representing user identities. These projects will implement software for specifying a Web site’s security policy; and the cards can reside in Java for Sun Java System Web Servers or Apache Tomcat or IBM’s WebSphere Application Server, Ruby on Rails, and PHP for Apache Web server. An additional project will implement a C Library that may be used generically for any Web site or service.

Microsoft blogger Mike Champion writes that the identy metasystem may be an example of WS standards that are taking root. He says the XML hype cycle may have crested, but useful related XML-based technologies are still spreading. Has Microsoft learned from its experience with Hailstorm identidy mechanisms? It would appear it may be so.

Read Champion’s blog at
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikechampion/archive/2007/05/21/ws-and-the-hype-cycle.aspx

The projects will be hosted on the open source project sites:http://informationcard.sourceforge.net
http://rubyforge.org/projects/informationcard
http://www.codeplex.com/informationcardjava
http://www.codeplex.com/informationcardruby

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Interoperability, Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.