The two organizations were holding "informal talks" on whether there could be convergence or interoperability between their respective protocol stacks for federated identity management, Roger Sullivan, newly elected president of the industry consortium and an Oracle vice president, said Wednesday. Microsoft is leading the charge for a set of specifications called WS-Star, while Liberty, whose members include Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and IBM, back the ID-Web Services Framework, or ID-WSF.
Federated ID management technology makes it possible for a person to sign in to one application on a corporate extranet, for example, and have the same user ID and password be used to access data or services running on other systems, whether they are within the same corporation or belong to customers or partners.
