May the force be with you?

Let me state that this is great. I'm glad to see Microsoft is re-examining it's support of standards. Check out John Fontana's coverage of this here and here.

Here's Joe Long's quote...

Joe Long, general manager of the connected identity and directory at Microsoft, said during a panel discussion at NetPro's Directory Experts Conference that Microsoft was being forced to re-examine if it would support SAML, the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) and the Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML).

Microsoft has introduced an interoperability promise and we are trying to understand the ramifications of that," Long said. "Hopefully we can make a commitment one way or the other in the next few months."

I guess I'm disappointed it occurs late in the game. I really felt that the acquisition of Zoomit and their metadirectory product in 1999 would be the start of an interoperability wave but it appears it might be the EU that's forcing the issue.

Better late than never, eh?

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