For those who are attending the Directory Experts Conference in Las Vegas NV in April, I had hoped to run a workshop before the start of the conference where people could dive in and explore the technology first-hand. That didn’t work out, so instead I am running a session on Wednesday morning, April 25th, at 9:15am. By the time you get to that session, you will all be Identity Selector experts. Trust me. I have my ways. The session abstract is below.

For those of you who aren’t attending DEC, if you ever wanted to go under the hood of Active Directory (or MIIS), this is where you need to be. Not only will you be party to an unbelievable amount of technical and strategic information, but you get to meet the folks who Know. And getting to talk to the folks who Know is an experience in itself. Just hanging out on the periphery and trying to absorb as much as I can has been an incredible learning experience for me. And just in case you don’t really know what I mean about meeting the folks who Know, you can check out ActiveDir.org, or just meditate on the picture at the bottom of this entry – that’s where the conference is being held. Not too shabby, hey? Those NetPro folks know how to throw a conference, let me tell ya…

CardSpace: The Selector Strikes Back!

P. Dingle, DEC Conference 2007
In the time since DEC 2006, Windows CardSpace has been released as part of the .NET Framework version 3.0, and Microsoft has released the technical specifications surrounding the Information Card profile. Higgins is one of several entities with an STS that can issue managed cards, and all sorts of relying party code is in the works, with more code supporting and consuming information cards every day.

In this session, Pamela will bring attendees up to speed on the current state of the identity metasystem:

• Communities surrounding user-centric identity.
• Where to get the toolkits, libraries and modules available, and what they do.
• Open source and proprietary initiatives.
• Protocol interoperability (playing nice with the neighbours).
• Pain points & barriers to adoption.
• Known successes.

If you are interested in staying informed as information card technology inevitably moves towards an explosion of mainstream adoption, this session should help you to keep the right items on your radar.