Many people ask me about the differences between Sun and Ping. Rather than write a long blog explaining the differences, I thought I’d just set-up time to talk with Ping and record a video podcast that people can watch. Check it out and learn!
I rcently had an opportunity to record a podcast with Eve Maler, principal engineer for the Sun CTO office. Eve was visiting Menlo Park, CA from Seattle, WA. We were able to discuss whether SAML & WS Federation can co-exist, common uses for standards and Eve’s secret life as a rock-star. Click the image below to listen to the podcast.
To listen to Eve’s band, click on the image below of Eve paying homage to the Rock Gods. I keep on telling everyone that she plays face-melting speed metal, but she tells me it’s more like “vintage, 70’s happy” music.
Standing too close to computer screen while listening to music has been known to melt faces.
Sean Bryden, one of the talented engineers on Sun’s team, posted a nice getting started page on the OpenSSO wiki hosted by Sun. Take a look. It’s a great way to get going with OpenSSO and all of it’s features.
OpenSSO Getting Started
Check out the blog below from Eric Norlin of Digital ID World.
Hitching Federation to the collaboration train
I couldn’t agree with him more. If we only talk about security when it comes to federation we forget one of the most compelling aspects of the opportunity — collaboration. Today, collaboration stacks limit flexibility because of dependencies on vendors software infrastructure. For example, you can’t deploy IBM’s Lotus Connections without the use of IBM Websphere or Microsoft Sharepoint without the use of Microsoft Windows Server System. These types of collaboration stacks place unnecessary infrastructure requirements on the customer.
Federation has the ability to free us of the burden of stack requirements and allow users to pick and choose those collaboration services that best fit their needs. In short, I should be able to easily leverage federation to create a “custom collaboration suite” comprised of those SaaS services that best meet my needs. I should also be able to enable these service regardless of what containers and OS platforms I have deployed.
Why use Lotus connections calendar service when I can use Google Calendar? Why use use IBMs blogging service, when I can use Wordpress? Let the end user choose the collabortion tools that best fit their needs and let’s avoid creating a monolithic collaboration stack that is weighted down with infrastructure dependencies.
Peace out!
