NGAD update from Mary-Jo

If you don't follow Mary-Jo Foley's "All about Microsoft" blog you should. Mary-Jo has been writing about Microsoft for many years now. Her latest post is "Microsoft updates its enterprise ABC (Active Directory, BizTalk and Communications Server) roadmaps" and here's what she has to say about Active Directory:

Microsoft is readying a number of Active Directory add-ons that company officials are counting on to provide a backbone for the three-screens-and-a-cloud vision that Microsoft execs love to tout. The company is working on what it calls Next Generation Active Directory (NGAD), which is a federation service more than it is a whole new version of Active Directory. The goal is to enable users to “federate across all our directories — the phone, the PC and the cloud,” said Identity Architect Kim Cameron. Microsoft took a first step toward enabling NGAD (which so far, has no public due date) by releasing to interested parties in mid-November a downloadable schema application programming interface (API), system.identity. In the nearer term, Microsoft is planning to deliver the near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 before the end of this year and deliver the final version within the first quarter of 2010, Cameron said. ADFS 2.0 is one component of Microsoft’s “Geneva” identity platform. Microsoft released to manufacturing its Geneva framework piece (now known as Windows Identity Foundation) a week-plus ago.

There are still lots of questions about NGAD out there. Hopefully, over the next few months we'll get some answers...

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