SAML in the news

I know, I know, this is getting to be the “all SAML all the time” channel… And it looks like I’m going to be the “SAML story lady” at the introductory day of next week’s Internet Identity Workshop in the Bay area, too. But there were two news snippets in the April 24 [update: oops, it’s April 25] edition of the XML.com Daily Newslink mailing that related to SAML that seemed worth sharing. (The archives seem to be a week behind the actual mailings, so I can’t link directly to this one.)

First, the Danish government is standing pat on its requirement for SAML V2.0 support in federated identity management for the Danish public sector. The article mentions this being an issue for Microsoft’s recently shipped federated identity product, as it has no SAML support. (This sounds strangely familiar.) The Danes have been pretty smart about XML standardization; they were early adopters of UBL and have reported that they were able to cut B2B costs with it.

Second, the folks at the OpenSAML.org open-source project, part of the Shibboleth initiative, have announced Technology Preview 1 of the Java edition of their SAML V2.0 support (downloads available here). Congratulations on that achievement! There’s still more basic support to be added, but this code base covers all SAML versions, and — according to the Newlink item — “[a]ll core SAML constructs are now supported to some degree.”

UPDATE: I’ve been reminded that there’s information on e-government adoption of Liberty technologies now available here. The latest version of “Liberty Federation” is SAML V2.0.