Our next project – Claims based Identity and Access Control
Not surprisingly maybe, security in general, and authentication & authorization in particular, is a consistently highly rated concern for our customers. These concerns are especially elevated with those considering the cloud, because they don’t have as much control on the cloud as they would typically have in their own datacenters. Sometimes, one could argue, for their own benefit, but that is a different discussion.
The “Claims Identity Guide” published in December 2009, was a foundational component in our “Cloud series” that followed it: Moving Applications to the Cloud , Developing Application for the Cloud and the recently released Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide . The identity content in all of them, is essentially based on the core scenarios and design principles described in the claims guide.
With the Claims guide we also pioneered a new style and design in our books, and it was very well received! We’ve got some great feedback from you on the content and the approach. Exciting things are happening in the identity space and we want to continue to help you create great solutions using these new components.
Our next project then is an extension to this guide that will address two new areas:
1- Access Control Service (ACS) V2, in the Windows Azure Platform will be available in production soon. ACS opens the doors to advanced identity management scenarios including federation, interop with popular identity standards such as OpenId, OAuth, SWT and SAML, use of popular social identity providers such as Facebook, Windows Live ID and Google. All of this is available today in labs.
2- SharePoint 2010 is “claims enabled”, meaning that it natively supports advanced identity management based on WS-Federation.
Interestingly (or not maybe), the core scenarios remain the same but the implementation details change and new interesting things can now be done much more easily. More or less our scope now looks like this:
The “blue” line is the existing content, “green” and “black” are the new chapters. Notice that they almost mirror what’s covered today. News and updates (including drafts, early samples, etc) will be published on https://claimsid.codeplex.com
As usual, we welcome feedback very much!