Microsoft code-name “Geneva” Beta 2 Now Available

Today Microsoft released beta 2 of “Geneva,” our open platform that dramatically simplifies user access and secure collaboration across organizational boundaries.

“Geneva” is part of our Business Ready Security strategy. It supports the strategy’s tenets of “integrating and extending security across the enterprise” and helping to “protect everywhere, access anywhere” through interoperability with heterogeneous environments and third party solutions.

Speaking of which, with beta 2 we’re announcing interoperability between “Geneva” and identity & access solutions from leading partners, via the SAML 2.0 and WS-Federation standards. Interoperable partner solutions include CA Federation Manager and CA SiteMinder, Novell Access Manager, SAP NetWeaver and Sun’s OpenSSO Enterprise and Fedlet software. We are issuing interoperability white papers with these partners and at TechEd this week SAP is presenting on their work with “Geneva.”

“Geneva” addresses a number of important customer challenges:

Implementing cross-organization single sign on

Connecting people and applications with those of other business units, customers, and partners is typically costly, risky and a drag on collaboration.Through identity federation in “Geneva,” IT departments can facilitate collaboration without managing extra user accounts and passwords, or compromising security.

Accessing hosted and cloud services

“Geneva” extends Active Directory authentication and single sign-on to cloud-based services, hosted by Microsoft or others, so IT can securely realize the flexibility and cost savings gains of hosted applications.

Developing identity-aware applications

With the “Geneva” Framework, a developer can apply pre-built application authentication, attribute lookup and authorization for richer, more secure applications…without becoming a security expert.

Simplifying access management

IT organizations have fewer resources to manage more and more applications that have many users, run on multiple platforms and require more complex forms of security. “Geneva” empowers IT to centrally manage access to applications of various types and apply security policy in a standard way across the enterprise.

You can download beta 2 code for all three components of “Geneva:”

· The "Geneva" Server for IT professionals to transform claims and other tokens, manage user access, and enables federation.

· The "Geneva" Framework for developers to build claims-aware .NET applications.

· Windows CardSpace "Geneva” for developers to provide end users with secure online identity management.

“Geneva” is slated for release in the second half of 2009. Download the beta and let us know what you think!