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It seems it barely started, and TechEd EMEA 2008 is almost done already. Identity is very well represented in this edition. Geneva has 2 booths in the ATE area, which experienced really a lot of traffic: you still have time tomorrow for taking advantage of the experts there (Sam, Sidd, Shiung, Tariq) and have a chat with Tejas or Laura. Speaking of Tejas: a couple of days ago he interviewed me about Geneva for teched online , you can see him above while he tries to politely listen to all my "eehhm" & "uhhm". PDC exacted a toll on me: the accent reduction that worked so well in teched NZ, AU and PDC is apparently not working when I am especially tired, and according to many comments I reverted to my Italianinglish in the last session (a redelivery of Kim's PDC session). Sorry guys, I'll try to do better on tomorrow's Identity & Cloud talk, and thanks for having given me good rates anyway :-) Tomorrow there will be 2 great sessions about Geneva: in the first one Sam and Sidd will give an intro to the server and the framework, in the second Sidd will dive deep in the Geneva Framework. If you are here in Barcelona I strongly encourage you to take advantage of their availability both at the sessions and at the booths: it's rare to see them so far from their lairs in Redmond :-) Read More...
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Immediately after IDWorld I will fly to Malmö, Sweden, where I will present a session "Identity & Cloud Services" for the Architecture track of Øredev 2008 . Øredev is a big developer conference, one of the most important for the Scandinavian countries: this is definitely a technical audience, which which I won't hesitate to delve in the details of the architectural patterns and some code here and there. The breadth of the sessions roaster is pretty impressive: check out the cool Silverlight-based agenda explorer here and you'll see for yourself :) In the same timeframe I'll visit customers in the neighboring Copenhagen, if you want to meet I'll be around! I still don't know how I'll manage to pack: Barcelona is pretty hot, Sweden is cold, and for various meetings I'll need a suit... oh well, if last year I managed the delta Spain-Iceland , I hope I'll manage this year too ;-) Read More...
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The week after TechEd EMEA I am traveling to Italy, where I'll give a session about identity & cloud services at the ID World conference . The ID World is a pretty different event from the ones I am used to speak for: there is a strong emphasis on physical authentication, and its delegates tend to be from the top management/government officials. That makes it extremely interesting, those are among the key decision makers and mingling with them is always a very instructive experience, however that also means that I can't afford to do my classic "in the gut of things" act: I'll have to distill the message at very high level, which is an interesting exercise per se. If you happen to be in Milan on the 18th, feel free to drop me a line! Read More...
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You all heard the news: Windows Azure here, Azure Services there ... now it's time to get you hands dirty: the team I working on, the Azure Services Evangelism team , just released the PDC preview of the Azure Services Training Kit . This is a handy package which contains a lot of things you can play with for exploring the new .NET Services, SQL Data Services, Live Services and Windows Azure: Hands on labs . All the HOLs that are available here in the Big Room on the PDC floor are here, in this neat package. Play with it, and if you have feedback on the .NET Access Control Service lab feel free to ping me :) Samples . Those are projects aimed at single technologies which show off programming model and examples of what you can achieve Complete demos . Everybody on the team came out with one or more complete demos, which demonstrate advanced use of the technologies (and combinations) in fairly realistic scenarios. Mine ended up in yesterday's talk with Kim and I am still figuring out how to package it, but all the other demos (OF COURSE) take advantage of identity so you're covered Tools . This is one of the things I think have the most value. In this release of the kit we are providing a complete MMC for managing your .NET service solution: access control rules, SQL Data service, workflows... this is all available in a handy rich client interface: and interestingly enough, all the interactions with the management APIs is wrapped in powershell cmdlets which can be used standalone Read More...
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Identity is everywhere at this PDC2008! After the keynotes and the many breakouts, let me introduce you to the Booth. We are in the Big Room, on your right, and we are easily recognizable thanks to 1) the big "Identity for software+services" signage and 2) the fashionable pistacchio shirts we drape ourselves in. The booth has staff from DPE|Identity, from the federated identity group, from the Live Services group and from the .NET services. There's always a lot of people there super-eager to introduce you to the glamorous world of identity, and delve into the details of the new products we announced this week . Above there's a snapshot of the people you can find there this morning. Form left to right: Matt Steele. Ask him about Geneva Server, then try to make him stop. Seriously, GREAT guy. Micah LaNasa. Inflexible booth shifts controller. Implements IStarbucksCardFactory. Vittorio Bertocci, AKA Vibro.NET. For more info click here Donovan Follette. ADFS guru, the true engine behind the Big Demo (more on this later) Tom Mereckis. Marketing mastermind, fearless paladin of the Claim Based Access initiative Caleb Baker. Author and speaker extraordinaire Liam Price. Live maven, knows everything about the new Live Services Not show in the picture (because they were with customers, while we were slacking & taking the picture): Rich Randall. Dev lean on CardSpace, tomorrow he'll unveil in more details CardSpace "geneva" Marc Goodner. Historical WS-* figure, ask him for some anecdote Read More...
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The latest issue of the Architecture Journal is available for download here (I am breaking the news even before the rest of the pages are updated from issue 15 to issue16: see how much I care about you?;-)). What makes this especially interesting is that issue 16 is entirely dedicated to identity! I have to admit that I've yet to read most of the articles, but I've definitely went through 2 of them: One is an interview/profile with Kim Cameron. It's a nice read, and I am sure you'll enjoy to know more about Kim The other is an article from yours truly, titled "Claims and Identity, On-Premise and Cloud Solutions". It expands on this post , and rolls in various others Writing for the Architecture Journal is a big honor, as you can see from the list of high profile former contributors, and I am very grateful to Diego for having my article in this issue. Thanks man! And thanks also to Gianpaolo , with whom I had many deep discussions that helped me to keep the abstraction tangents to what i hope is an acceptable level :-) As usual, if you have feedback feel free to send it my way Read More...
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Well, it's almost one month since I wrote the last " useful " posts : you would not believe how incredibly busy I am on stuff I can't talk about just yet (but soon, very soon). In this quick update I am excited to report that I am going to speak at TechEd New Zealand & TechEd Australia ! As strange as it may sound, the 114 flights I've boarded since I moved to Corp (October 2005) never took me under the equatorial line; furthermore, it's since first grade that I'm told how cool it is that New Zealand is at the exact antipodes of Italy, has roughly a boot shape as well, etc... that's the farthest place from home I can travel to without leaving the planet :-) I am going to deliver 2 sessions , both in NZ and in AU: Identity & Cloud Services (Architecture track, level 300) The shift towards cloud computing is one of the major trends in today’s IT industry. As resources and assets are increasingly hosted off-premise, traditional strategies for access control and identity management are proving incapable of handling distributed scenarios and cross-boundary communication. This presentation briefly outlines how architectures relying on claims-based identity management, security tokens and open standards can address cloud computing scenarios with the same ease with which they can handle traditional ones. The identity capabilities of Biztalk Services will be featured as a concrete example of an application of the new paradigm. “Zermatt” Developer Framework: Putting Authentication Read More...
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On a flight between Seattle and Tokyo. I've just put down The Big Switch , and decided it's time to write about cloud computing and how identity management is going to play a key role for the success of the new paradigm. As you go though this post, please remember that (as always) you are reading my personal opinions/views and not a press release from my employer :-) Cloud Computing: a nanointroduction The word "Cloud" is well on its way to be one of the most hyped & overloaded term in the recent history of IT: just enter "Cloud Computing" in your search engine of choice and be prepared to navigate a huge result set. A good way of ramping up on the topic would be to read the recent Forrester report " Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise? "; or, if you are less technical, you can start by reading the aforementioned The Big Switch (as long as you read those *** grano salis , without ever turning off your critical thinking module). For the purpose of understanding this post, I'll give you here my usual oversimplified stance: Cloud Computing is mainly a new deployment model. Let's say you are the solution architect of an enterprise, and you are in the process of setting up a new capability for your company. As usual, the two big alternatives are build the solution yourself, buy it as a service if available or all the intermediate approaches which combine the two. If you decide to build even just a little piece of the solution, you are implicitly stepping up for running Read More...
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On the 23rd I'll be in Singapore, practically my third home, and will present at the Singapore's Regional Architect Forum (the famous RAF). There is something in that country that charmed me already during my first visit in '89, and every time I have half a chance I try to go visit. Meeting my good pal Linda is certainly one of the things I like of going to Singapore: you would no believe the staggering amount of great work she gets done, all without ever losing her smile :-) A close second would be the levels of the customers & the industry in general there. Singapore's IT is often ahead of the curve, which makes it a perfect audience for very new ideas and approaches. That's why I am looking forward to present on S+S, cloud services and how the new paradigms are already affecting the way in which we deal with identity management. I will also give a chalktalk about the internet service bus , I hope to elicit some deep discussion and explore with Singapore's architects the implications of architecting solutions with tools like the ISB (without ever forgetting the identity aspect, of course). Also in this case Gianpaolo will present on S+S. I am sure he will provide a lot of food for thought, I can't think of anybody more qualified for explaining the topic. besides, his sessions are always fun :-) see you there! Read More...
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In a couple of weeks I'll be in Kuala Lumpur, at the IASA's IT Architect Regional Forum Conference ; I will present on identity in the context of S+S and cloud services, which happens to be the topic that intrigues me the most nowadays. I am really excited for the session, but even more so for the chance of meeting fellow architects and discuss how these new ideas apply to their scenarios. Also: I never went to Kuala Lumpur, and I am very very curious about everything. I'll be there with my good friend Gianpaolo , who will present (surprise surprise) on S+S. I had an exclusive preview of his session, and it's *great*. Don't miss it. Looking forward to be there and spend some time with him and Aaron ! Read More...
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I am delighted to announce a slight change in my role: from now on I'll focus on identity architecture, especially in the context of S+S and cloud services. YEEEEEES!!! If you are a regular reader of this blog you may have gotten the impression it was already the case. Actually, for the last three years I worked with enterprise early adopters and connected systems (WCF, WF, CardSpace). If you ever read a case study on those, chances are I may have worked on the project in some form: I had the chance of working with the best and see a wiiide range of scenarios, I loved it (most recent example here ). It's simply that when it came to blogging I just loved to dig deep in identity topics , then the articles and the book , the sessions , so... I now have the chance of staying on the topic full time. Fantastic :-) P.S.: recently Mike challenged me to surprise everybody and make a post of just three lines (I think he was poking fun at me for the the unmanageable length of this , this and this ). I thought I could do it with this post, but it turns out I am actually unable to... scary :-) Read More...
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Almost one year ago I briefly mentioned the Biztalk Service SDK, here and here . A new version has recently been made available: you would not believe the amount of new features that were added to it in this timeframe. The main reason of excitement for me is that this new release supports managed cards ! It's a bit late at night here in Redmond and the drowsiness makes me feel less than bright right now, so I better defer detailed explanations to tomorrow (or the weekend). Anyway, for the identirati tuned in, this basically means that the service bus offers a R-STS that will accept, among many other means of authentication, also third party's managed cards. The behavior of the R-STS can be influenced by using the Biztalk Services identity portal , or by management API; you can translate attribute claims into authorization claims (if an incoming claim has a certain value you can issue a token which tells to the ultimate destination that the caller is authorized to perform the call; you can copy the input claims directly in the issued token so that the info is preserved; and so on). "Artist" rendering below: Again, I'll be more verbose in a later post: in fact, I plan to walk you through a sample that will make you hit the ground running exactly with that feature. The managed card support is the feature that I find most appealing ( surprised ?), but in fact there are many other great additions such as X509 authentication, REST management APIs, support for multiple languages ... Read More...
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On the Paris-Seattle flight, coming back after 2 weeks spent stuffing myself with all sorts of food with the excuse "after all, you can't find this in USA" :) Before hurling myself back in the vortex of daily work, and celebrate the end of the year with something crazy, I want to take some time writing down some hallucinatory (=vision without execution) thoughts about omnidirectional identities . Be warned, this may be just pointless rambling at this point. Few weeks ago I chatted about this in front of a microphone with John Udell , digressing along a crazy tangent instead of answering his questions about the book (I eventually came back to Earth and answered properly :)). I don't know if he'll deem those fragments publication worthy, but just in case I'll make a brain dump here. It's not that there's much more to do in this small seat anyway (just finished the latest Eco . He didn't mention underbite at all, I'm happy). Looking back at the activities related to identity in the past year, I am glad to report that amazing progress has been done. Something that makes 2007 very different from 2006 is the kind of work that was made: in 2007 the accent was on execution. The vision behind the metasystem is still being explored, sure, like Kim's series on linkage or the discussions about display token and first law demonstrate; and I feel that conjugating the metasystem and claims in enterprise environment is an area that still need focus (especially in fighting old forma mentis that Read More...
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