The award was for work on the UK Government Gateway project; this is a centralised authentication gateway for access to online public services, and the work in question was to add a Liberty ID-FF front-end to the gateway server.
The assessment panel was a mix of Liberty and non-Liberty, vendor and non-vendor judges, including Michael Barrett of PayPal, Gerry Gebel of Burton Group, John Fontana from Network World and Christine Varney of law firm Hogan and Hartson... and me.
The other award-winning projects were EduTech, for a school test results aggregation system in New York State, and T-Online in Germany, for a federated subscriber identity management deployment.
Although these three were the deployments which were rated highest over-all, I felt all the nominations were strong. They reflected world-wide adoption of Liberty specifications, and clear value-add for the adopters and their respective partners and customers. Personally, I was delighted to see two European projects among the winners, and also two public-sector deployments. We should be wary of thinking that federated identity always means e-commerce...
As far as the Gateway project is concerned, I think there were a couple of factors which may have caught the attention of my fellow assessors:
- the same development project added a WS-Federation front-end to the server. As a result, public sector bodies planning to use the Gateway for authentication now have a choice of well-established federation protocols supported by mainstream software infrastructure products.
- interestingly, the coding for both front-end protocol handlers was done by Microsoft's development team in the UK... with a little help from Sun.
This is one of a number of identity-related projects on which Sun and Microsoft have worked together since the 'technology agreement' of a couple of years ago, and to my mind, it clearly shows the potential for such joint efforts to be of direct benefit the customer. The Microsoft folks were extremely professional and good fun to work with, too.
Here are some related links:
Liberty Alliance IDDY page
DIDW conference site
UK Cabinet Office - e-government unit page
Government Gateway site
Posted by racingsnake
@ 05:17 PM GMT+00:00
![[RSS Newsfeed]](/themes/sotto/images/valid-rss.png)
![[This is a Roller site]](/themes/sotto/images/roller-logo.gif){kind=logo}