In my last blog, “Federated Access Manager 8.0: The Overview,” I focused on a high-level overview of the upcoming product. In this blog I’d like to outline the key objectives of the FAM 8.0 release and a short synopsis of what features we’ll be delivering.
Our release is scheduled for March ‘08, so whyyyyyyy am I writing about this now, you ask? Because all of this functionality will be available in OpenSSO over the next month.
Think of this as our “Spring Training.” We want everyone to download a stable OpenSSO build and play, play, play. (Hopefully like my beloved Yankees!) Feedback on the product will be encouraged and welcome, so stay tuned. In the meantime here’s the down low on FAM 8. Enjoy . . .
FEDERATED ACCESS MANAGER 8.0: Key Features

Simplified Platform: Simplification! Simplification! Simplification! The FAM 8.0 release will focus on significantly simplifying functionality for the user so that they can easily complete the most commonly used tasks during pre- and post-configuration in a jiffy. These simplified workflows will be dynamic and allow the customer to very quickly deploy a completely load balanced solution in minutes. Below is a preview of one of our simplified flows.

Heterogeneity: We will continue to support a diverse range of protocols, containers, directories, WAM, Federation and OS platforms so that customers can choose what best fits their needs. In addition to supporting Active Directory and Sun Java System Directory Server, we will be expanding our directory support to include Tivoli Directory Server. We will also be conducting detailed testing of the product with not only our WAM Identity infrastructure, but also Oracle Access Manager & CA Siteminder. Basically, the goal is to provide an infrastructure agnostic solution that allows greater customer choice.
Access Management Features: The FAM 8.0 product release will focus on improving the ease of deployment of our Access Management solution by centralizing agent configuration and AM instance configuration. We will also be expanding our protocol support to include XACML support. The major access management features in the 8.0 release are as follows:

* Centralized Agent Configuration & Deployment
* Centralized Instance Configuration
* XACML Request/Response

Federation Management: The focus on federation will be expanding our product interoperability so that customers can implement our federation service without having to change their internal architecture or infrastructure. The goal is to make our federation offering infrastructure agnostic. The major federation features in the 8.0 release are as follows:

* WS-Federation 1.1
* Simple Federated Partner Enablement
* Multi-Federation Protocol Hub
* Secure Attribute Exchange to federate-enable legacy applications

Identity Services: Sun is taking on a leadership role in driving the adoption of identity services. Specifically, we are working with several key customers to jointly develop an identity service specification that details, down to the use case level, what functionality needs to be exposed for building business applications using composite services. In the FAM 8.0 release the following identity services will be exposed:

* Authentication as a service
* Authorization as a service
* Audit as a service
* Attribute Query as a service
* Generalized Trust Authority (STS that supports Liberty and WS-Trust based interactions)

Web Services Security: We are expanding our web service security story so that customers can implement plug-ins to protect web services rather than doing it programmatically. We will be releasing web service security plug-ins for the following containers in FAM 8.0:

* Sun Java System Application Server
* Sun Java System Web Server
* BEA Weblogic
* IBM Websphere

Cheers!

OK. I’ve been heads down for the last two months but wanted to share some of what we’re working on in our next product release.
We’re in the process of combining Access Manager and Federation Manager in to a single product called Federated Access Manager (FAM). Scheduled to release in March 2008, the product will be built from a single, externally managed and accessible code base, which is part of an open source project called OpenSSO. All builds of FAM are publicly available via the OpenSSO web site. An early access version of the product will be available November 2007. To explore Federated Access Manager 8.0 please go to the OpenSSO website to download the latest stable build.
FAM will be delivered as a self-contained J2EE application. Delivering the product as a pure J2EE application provides ease of deployment and minimizes the number of processes that are running at one time. This enables Sun to provide access management, federation, and web services security functionality out of the box and delivered as a simple WAR file that can be deployed in minutes. Other Federation/WAM solutions often require the deployment of multiple components, scripts and have multiple processes running at once.
In my next blog I’ll talk a bit about what features will be delivered in FAM 8.0. Also, check out my pretty little roadmap slide below that outlines how FAM and OpenSSO relate to one abother. Wocka Wocka Wocka!