A key benefit of OpenSSO, the open source project used to derive Sun’s commercial offering — Federated Access Manager 8, is that it’s 100% Java. This enables Sun to provide one offering that includes access management, federation, and secure web services in a tiny WAR file. Deploy the WAR via your container and you’re done. There is no installer!
In addition to providing lots of features, Sun has also begun to leverage other open source projects to improve the usability of OpenSSO. Specifically, OpenSSO now includes an embedded version of OpenDS, an open source community project building a free and comprehensive next generation directory service, based on LDAP and DSML standards. OpenDS is 100% Java, which means it can easily be embedded in OpenSSO and made transparent to the user.
When a user installs OpenSSO they now have the option to choose OpenDS as the embedded directory for the configuration store and/or user store. In other words, a user can deploy OpenSSO without ever having to configure a directory! In Sun’s commerical release we plan to support the embedded directory in production for the configuration store only. Using the embedded directory as a user store will only be supported in developer environments.
Props to the Sun engineering team and the OpenSSO community on coming up with another great innovation!
Option 1: OpenSSO Embedded Configuration Store

Option 2: OpenSSO Embedded User Store

We at Sun are doing our darnedest to constantly improve how we communicate with customers. As the only open source WAM, federation and secure web services solution in the market, Sun’s Federated Access Manager has a great advantage because we are totally transparent in everything that we do. To that end, I want to share with you our latest innovation in this area — The Sun Federated Access Manager / OpenSSO Wiki (wiki.opensso.org). This is a public sight that contains everything FAM and OpenSSO. It complements our documentation by providing access to real-time information as it is made available. It also provides a lot of detail around common questions and access to all kind of multimedia. Take a look and enjoy. When you have questions that arise this is a great first stop. ENJOY!