Liberty Alliance Plans Passport Interoperability

EvanDelay writes "The Liberty Alliance Project, which is developing Web technology to facilitate single sign-on authentication, plans to support interoperability between its system and Microsoft Corp.'s rival Passport system. Computerworld has the story."

Comments

Timing and Priorities

[e8johan]

This is too early to give in to Microsoft. As neither version has any significant market advantage yet it is not good to make the systems one-way compatible. This only makes it easier for customers to move to .Net, not the otherway around.

The priority must be to compete with .Net, not to become the little brother of it. There are a number of points that need to be equally good/better than .Net:

1. Ease of use (both user-wise and coder-wise).
2. Security and user control of information
3. User base (on both sides again).

The first point is the reason of the project from the start and must be maintained.
The second point is the advantage, no-one can reach me, and on-one can reach the customer-records of a competing company without authorization. Not only geek users should be afraid of giving too much info away, also the companies utilizing these platforms must be aware and protect their customer bases.
The third point is probably the pass/fail issue of the entire project. It must get adopted, from the average user and by the service providing companies.