Federated I.D. Goes Mainstream

Imagine if you had to acquire a separate driver’s license for each state you traveled in the U.S. What if you couldn’t board a plane for a domestic flight unless you had a license for the state you planned to visit prior to check-in.  In a world with this much complexity, interstate commerce would not exist or be too costly for anyone to participate.  However, when it comes to online identities in our schools and universities, that’s exactly the world we live.  It is the number one challenge in higher education and an emerging opportunity for K12 schools.

The answer to this conundrum is to establish an identity federation.  Just like all of the states trusts each other in the U.S., I can assert a claim that I know how to drive and the state of Texas will back my claim in all of the our states and territories.  In the real world, we have a federated identity model with our respective state driver’s license. Microsoft has delivered a capability for schools and universities to make our online identities work similar to our real life identities through claims-based Federated Identity Management (FIdM) in Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFSv2), formerly codenamed Project Geneva.

For some of us that know how old and challenging this problem is, identity federations are the foundational step to enabling the vision for personalized, student-centered learning.  Researchers from different universities can collaborate online in an ad-hoc or ongoing fashion without the need for central IT to create, provision, and managed multiple identities along the way-essentially issuing a driver’s license for each guest in their state. Moreover, it provides a way for students to connect to third-party online services without the need for multiple passwords and credentials.

Microsoft has been delivering federated identity services since Windows Server 2003 R2.  With Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft implemented its federated identity services model using the industry standards developed by OASIS to support SAML and WS-Trust claims.  This allows tremendous interoperability between Open Source and third-party applications Since ADFSv2 is included with Windows Server 2008 R2, schools and universities have a critical component to creating a Shibboleth federated identity model with only a modest investment.

It’s a new era for learning.

For more information on how Microsoft’s Federated Identity works in the real world, read my earlier post on Lake Washington School District here.

Learn more at www.microsoft.com/endtoendtrust

and

http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/en/us/identity-access-management.aspx.