Microsoft and Sun Partnership Progress

This is somewhat old news by now, but I wanted to remind folks about the announcements in this press release.  https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/may05/05-13MSSunEventPR.mspx

Basically, Microsoft and Sun have really started to show some progress on partnerships that were annouced a year ago.  The two items that are most interesting to me are:

1. WS-Federation Interop.   Microsoft and Sun are working on interop protocols to allow WS-Federation and Liberty protocols to work together.  This will be accomplished by 2 specifications:  Web Single Sign-On Metadata Exchange (Web SSO MEX) Protocol and Web Single Sign-On Interoperability Profile (Web SSO Interop Profile).

2. WS-Management.  This new specification will allow systems management technologies to communicate cross platform more easily.  Today, we can use WMI to gather system data or send system commands to Windows systems.  WS-Management will allow similar activities, but to various platforms and hardware technologies without being Windows specific.

Very exciting!