Federated Identity is one of those strange beasts that was born out of multiple standards bodies at the turn of the 21st century. Federation today largely means "secure web single sign on," and speaks a message of purely security, but that wasn't always the case. In the "early days" of federation the promise wasn't simply to "secure," but also to help enable new ways of doing business.
Those early dreams seem largely to have disappeared, and as a guy who spent several years of his life working on them -- well, I'm tired of it.
Now, I can hear the folks in the trenches of the federation world saying "yeah but" already, as they are heads down with pipelines and implementations and quarterly goals. But hear me out on this.
What I'm *not* advocating is a pie-in-the-sky, "let's get visionary" love-fest. What I am advocating is hitching the federation car to the speeding locomotive that is online collaboration. In the process of doing so, federation will be forced to move away from "security messaging."
Online collaboration, in general, and Microsoft's Sharepoint, specifically, are consistently ending up at the top of enterprise initiatives in 2008. Indeed, Sharepoint has quietly been *the* IT deployment story of 2007. In conjunction, IT departments everywhere are waking up to the fact that "collaboration" (wikis and blogs and RSS, etc) is happening with or without their knowledge and consent, and they'd really prefer it be with.
Accordingly, IT is being "forced" to deal with the collaboration "problem" because they know that ignoring it, or planning for 2009 will do nothing to slow this one down.
Call me crazy, but I really think this is the "wave of adoption" that federation has been looking for since its birth. To take advantage of it, federation needs to figure out how it is *the* enabling technology for collaboration -- and not simply "the piece that secures online collaboration."
Maybe I'm just an old school federation convert, but the early promises of the Liberty Alliance's work don't seem any less valid today - they just seem largely ignored. Perhaps collaboration can help revive those goals.
--Eric Norlin
