Maybe your organization, like many, is looking at how to easily and securely share data and access to its network with designated external users. An identity federation solution in Windows Server 2003 Release 2 (R2), called Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) can help. In "Identity Federation with ADFS," November 2006, InstantDoc ID 93453, I introduced ADFS and defined identity federation, which links disparate identity and resource providers to make it easier for organizations to share data. I also discussed how an organization can take advantage of ADFS and showed a simple ADFS operation example. Now let's dig deeper into the ADFS components to examine how they work together and look at what's involved in planning for and setting up ADFS in your environment.