C'est la vie !

I watched online the presentation Bill Gates gave at RSA this week and I thought the InfoCard demo was interesting. First off it was the first time I saw an actual demonstration of the identity selector on Vista - quite interesting, nice UI I have to say. It is certainly a very user-friendly approach to solve the identity management nightmare we all face as online consumers. I really think it is to Microsoft’s credit to have raised awareness on the need for a more user-centric approach of identity management.

That said, I read on this recent article of the Seattle P-I that (some) people at Microsoft believe that InfoCard and the Liberty Alliance approach “address different parts of the digital identity problem”... Now I beg to differ on that one.

To me Liberty’s web services framework (ID-WSF) proposes a framework that is generic  enough to support all kinds of identity-based scenarios including the most user-centric ones. It is true that in most of its PR so far the Alliance has not emphasized the user-centric aspect of identity management hence the impression for some people that Liberty’s specifications are focused on the enterprise. For that I think Microsoft’s InfoCard is a great reminder that we (at Liberty) should also explain how our specifications can be used to support a user-centric approach.

At Sun we happened to have recently looked at that issue and we’ve come up with a demonstrator (very early stage) that shows how, using Liberty’s ID-WSF protocols, we can create a module that greatly helps the user in dealing with his digital identities. You can find a series of screenshots that are accompanied with explanations there (I’ll be polishing a flash file soon). Hopefully the comments are self-sufficient but just in case here’s a short summary of what the demo actually shows:

The user is visiting an online wine merchant where he purchases a few bottles (Bordeaux of course ). Upon checkout the wine site will need some identity data about the customer (like his age or his shipping address). A Java applet is fired off the html page of the site with the name of the attributes (i.e. the identity data) required by the site. For instance the first step is to verify the customer is actually entitled to purchase wine. Using this information the applet (that speaks ID-WSF) is able to identify what are the relevant attribute providers (I believe they are called Identity providers in InfoCard’s terminology). The end result is that the applet is able to present to the customer a set of providers to choose from (very much akin to the card concept with InfoCard’s identity selector). Since it is an applet running no information is transfered to the wine merchant until the customer actually clicks on one of the provider.

So the idea of this demo is to illustrate the flexibility of Liberty Alliance’s specifications. Not only they support the enterprise use cases but they also do enable a great user-centric experience and guess what?  it’s platform independent

As Eve put it, it’s InfoCard, Liberated!!