Microsoft Aims to Play Nice in 'Identity Metasystem'

Published: May 30, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft is taking steps to boost the uptake of its new "CardSpace" identity management technology (formerly codenamed "InfoCards") by starting open-source projects that will allow developers of other platforms to plug into the "identity metasystem" it's trying to create, the software giant revealed last week.

As part of last week's announcements, Microsoft said it's creating four open-source projects to help Web developers adopt its CardSpace technology, which is a function introduced with the WinFX application programming interface (API) in Visual Studio 2005 and is supported in Windows Vista and will be supported in Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft's CardSpace technology is a programming and visualization tool that provides users with a way to manage their digital identities, using information cards. For various Web sites that people visit, they may use different identities and authentication mechanisms. On the backend, CardSpace is all about unifying these identities under a Web services architecture that developers can easily plug their authentication mechanisms into. On the front end, the technology is about giving users something they can physically see on their computer screen, much like the identification cards they carry in their wallet.

The projects Microsoft has created, which will be hosted on Web sites such as rubyforge.org and www.codeplex.com, will provide implementation of Microsoft's information card technology for other platforms, including one for Java running on Sun Microsystems's Web server, Apache's Tomcat, and IBM's WebSphere Application Server; one for Ruby on Rails; one for PHP on the Apache Web server; and one C library that can be used generically for any Web site or service.

Microsoft is putting much of the underlying and surrounding technology into the public realm, including CardSpace, which was released into open source, via the Open Specification Promise (OSP) license, last fall, along with 35 other Web services specifications, such as WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation.

Bob Muglia, the senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, says the identity metasystem is badly needed in the real world. "Our customers expect us to enable interoperability between Microsoft-based solutions, as well as across other platforms and technologies," he says. "For this reason, we take a very pragmatic, customer-centric view of interoperability."

Microsoft is also working to enable the synchronization of identity information and passwords between its implementation of the lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), Active Directory, and the open-source implementation, called OpenLDAP. To that end, the company says it's working with the French company KERNEL Networks and the Oxford Computer Group to provide an OpenLDAP adapter for Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007. No word was given on when that adapter can be expected to be available.

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