Microsoft Plans Link Between Directory, Live Services

Users would get a single sign-on for both the company's Active Directory and its Windows Live Web-based services.

Microsoft plans to sync its Active Directory with its Windows Live Web-based services to give users a single sign-on for applications and services both inside a company network and on the Web.

On its site, Microsoft says that the Active Directory service provides a single-log-on capability and a central repository for information for a user's entire infrastructure.

The plan will be made possible through Windows Live ID, formerly Microsoft's Passport service, although the company has not nailed down a schedule for when the functionality will be available, Michael Stephenson, Microsoft's director of product management for identity and access, said on Tuesday.

During a keynote speech at the Tech Ed conference in Boston last week, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, briefly mentioned the plan to permit federated network identity between Active Directory and Microsoft's Live online services. He framed it as part of Microsoft's plan to bridge the gap between the relatively consumer-oriented Live services and the enterprise services that the company plans to offer to business customers. Ozzie did not, however, provide many details on how the service would work.


The Plan
According to Stephenson, Windows Live ID (available now) is the mechanism for federating user identity across all of Microsoft's Windows Live services. Eventually, Microsoft plans to link Windows Live ID to Active Directory so that, when a users sign in to Active Director to access services within a company's network, they will automatically be signed in to Live services--Windows Live Messenger, Office Live, and other Web-based services--as well.

"The goal is to have transparent and secure access of these services without the creation of a separate network identity," he said.

Coordinating identity between online services and Active Directory is not a new concept, said Matt Rosoff, analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "Microsoft has been talking about federating Active Directory and Passport for at least three years, and I don't know what kind of progress they've made," he said.

Passport is currently a way for users to authenticate themselves across various Microsoft consumer services, but it has never lived up to the vision Microsoft had for it, Rosoff said. Microsoft had hoped that third parties would pay the company to authenticate their Web-site users through Passport. According to Rosoff, this arrangement didn't fly with companies because the data they collect by signing up users to their Web sites is valuable to them.

"Most companies looked at it as, 'We can handle authentication,'" he said.

Services such as Windows Live Mail, however, could add a new dimension to Microsoft's current plan to sync Active Directory with the former Passport service, Rosoff said. "It might pave the way for things like allowing corporations to use Windows Live e-mail to host their corporate e-mail," he said.



Related Links:

• Go back to category Internet & Networks to read more reviews and articles.
• Go back to Software Magazine's main page.