Enterprisey thoughts – John Gøtze
Posts tagged Enterprise Architecture
Microsoft and Danish Government in New Identity Deal
04 years ago
A year ago, my former collegue Søren Peter Nielsen wrote, on behalf of the Danish government, a letter to Microsoft. Seems he got a response, and I’m sure it’ll interest XMLGrrl and many others, that an announcement was made yesterday: Agreement between the National IT and Telecom Agency and Microsoft: Agreement concerning partial support of the SAML 2.0 standard.
“The ongoing dialog between the National IT and Telecom Agency and Microsoft has resulted in an agreement on partial support of the SAML 2.0 standard in Microsoft’s forthcoming version of their federation product named Active Directory Federation Services 2″, the agency writes.
The text agreed upon is as follows:
“The Danish public sector has chosen SAML 2.0 as their federation standard. Microsoft products use WS-Federation and WS-Trust as the foundation of their federated identity architecture. The Danish government has agreed that the SAML 2.0 token format is sufficient to provide basic interoperability between WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 environments as a common assertion format, without loss of authentication integrity.
To support interoperability between WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 based products Microsoft has agreed to support the SAML 2.0 token format in the future release of Active Directory Federation Services code-named Active Directory Federation Services “2″. Microsoft will provide the Danish public sector Centre of Service Oriented Infrastructure with pre-release code to help analysis and planning of solutions for integrating WS-Federation-based clients in the Danish federation, and to collect feedback on the feature implementation.
In addition, the co-authors of WS-Federation (including Microsoft) have submitted the specification to OASIS for standardization. This step further enables interoperability between federated environments that deploy SAML 2.0-based products and those that deploy WS-Federation-based products.”
In commenting the agreement, the agency writes: “With this agreement a possibility for inclusion of Microsoft based clients in a common public SAML 2.0 based federation has opened”, and notes:
The integration will require the standard based login solutions to be expanded with a special integration code. The solution is therefore a pragmatic tactical integration solution, but with the above-mentioned partial SAML 2.0 support from Microsoft it is expected that the integration can be done without influencing the individual “Microsoft Active Directory Federation Service†user organizations.
The agency notes that more iinformation on the concrete possibilities will be published as the National IT and Telecom Agency’s Centre for Service Oriented Infrastructure receives pre-release code from Microsoft that can be integration tested.
The agency elaborates a bit more on the deal:
It is still desired, that Microsoft support all of the SAML 2.0 standard in their products, but the above-mentioned agreement are a good first step towards more convergence among standards for transverse user management.
The National IT and Telecom Agency also sees the filing of the WS-Federation (WS-FED) specification for standardization in OASIS as a step that can promote convergence among federation standards.
It should be stressed that it does not mean that the WS-Federation specification is recommended equally to SAML 2.0 for common public solutions.
When the results of the standardization with WS-Federation become available (expectedly in the end of 2008) it might be relevant to do a new assessment but for now the SAML 2.0 it is still the only standard, which is recommended as a federation standard for Danish common public solutions.
So, there we have it.
I want to congratulate Søren Peter on a job well done. Stand firm on SAML 2.0, the open ecosystem needs it. And thanks to Microsoft for listening to customers (but why only partial support?).
Norwegians Launch Interoperability Framework, Mandate ODF
04 years ago
Norway’s Minister of Government Administration and Reform, also Minister of IT, Ms Heidi Grande Røys, in a press announcement on Friday, Første skritt mot en offentlig sektor uten leverandørbindinger, announced that with the launch of the Norwegian Government’s interoperability framework, called Referansekatalog for IT-standarder), the Norwegian government takes “the first step towards a public sector without vendor fixation”.
Of particular interest is that the Norwegian government boldly goes ahead and proposes mandation of a set of standards for document formats:
- ODF is mandated for document exchange and downloads of editable documents. According to the framework document, OASIS ODF 1.0 is the standard used, but the reference link actually goes to ODF 1.1.
- PDF is mandated for publication of static documents on the web.
- UTF-8 (ISO/IEC 10646) is mandated as a universal character set standard, to be used in web publications, connections to registres and databases, and all other textual exchange and archiving.
Regarding ODF, according to Digi.no, Ms Røys at the press conference said she wants ODF to be the preferred document format also internally in the administration, and not “just” for external communication. But as I read the published documents, there is no actual mandation of internal use. One could – and should – of course argue that ODF “all the way” is the only sensible way to implement the policy, but I’m sure some will argue otherwise.
According to the press announcement, the interoperability framework is in consultion until 20 August 2008. I suppose they actually mean 20 August 2007. The mandation is proposed enacted by 1 January 2009.
Included in the interoperability framework is a set of national government standards, such as NOARK4 for archiving, and also a plan for extending the framework to other areas. On the latter, the document analyses the Danish, Belgian, German and British interoperability frameworks standard by standard, and explicitely argues that a European alignment and cooperation is necessary.
Conference Time
04 years ago
I’ll be attending a few conferences as a member of the Press in the coming weeks, so if you’re there too, and want to meet up, do get in touch.
On Sunday, I’ll leave for Vienna for SAPPHIRE 2007. “Business at the speed of change“. It’ll be interesting to hear more about where SAP is with SOA and much more, but frankly, the presentation I look forward to the most is the one by Geoffrey Moore, on Business Network Transformation to Create Competitive Advantage.
Then in June, I’ll go to Orlando for the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007. “What Keeps Me Rational?”. I think I’ll focus on architectural issues, and it seems there will be talk about both SOA and EA. It’ll also be interesting to hear about where Danny Sabbah is with Jazz.
Bob Sutor in First Life, Copenhagen
15 years ago
Bob Sutor is in Copenhagen, and will give a public lecture at the IT University at 5pm today, Wednesday. He’ll talk about what’s going on with open standards and why it’s important, also to IT students. I’ve reserved the big lecture hall (Aud 1), and everyone is welcome to join us.
I’m certain that Bob will talk about the situation around document formats, where a lot is happening. Just covering the past couple of days’ events around the standards is a talk in itself: It’s clear now (!) that many standards bodies point to contradictions around Ecma Office Open XML and its submission to ISO, so the fast-track for Microsoft’s Office 2007 format becoming a standard is slowed down (at least, if not stopped?). In other news, two more US states gives more momentum to OpenDocument, and ODF passes yet another maturity signpost as ODF 1.1 is now an OASIS Standard.
Over at my Danmark 2.0 blog, I have suggested that the newly formed S-142/U-34 Danish Standards mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 34 spend their time on making ODF a Danish Standard. That would be kind of ironic with all those Microsoft Gold Partners in the group, I know, but none the less, I’m deadly serious about the proposal!
