The OpenSSO Project is soliciting feedback on their Early Access Build -- OpenSSO Express Build 5. With the release of this build, community members now have the opportunity to participate in the Early Access (EA) program for Sun's next commercial offering. Review the Early Access documentation and hammer away at Express Build 5! Send your EA feedback to opensso.eafeedback@dev.java.net so we can make the product perfect. Thanks in advance!

Completing our trilogy of articles on integrating Sun Java System Access Manager with Microsoft web applications, Marina Sum, our resident technical author, and Madan Ranganath, Access Manager policy agent engineer, focus on single sign-on from Access Manager to Outlook Web Access 2003. If you work your way through the first two installments, covering IIS and SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and this final article, you'll know pretty much all there is to know about single sign-on between Access Manager and Microsoft's web applications.

If you've tried to configure single sign-on with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, you'll know that can be a bit... non-trivial. The Sun Java System Access Manager policy agent engineering team have been working on extending the existing agent for IIS to allow single sign-on into SharePoint (and Outlook Web Access, but that's another story...). Robertis Tongbram and Marina Sum just wrote this scenario as an article over at Sun Developer Network.

Of course, all Access Manager policy agents also work with OpenSSO, Access Manager's open source alter ego, so when Policy Agent for IIS 6 Hotpatch 8 hits the street it'll work with OpenSSO, too.

Another neat technical article just hit the wire over at Sun Developer Network: Achieving SSO With Sun Java System Access Manager and SAML. Vasanth Bhat and Marina Sum look at how to integrate Access Manager with a third party application - in this case SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal 2004s - via SAML. Neat stuff!

Dennis shows graphically the Life of an OpenSSO Session including Creation, Validation, FailOver, Recovery and Termination. Previously he had shown SSO and Access Control and Authentication.

I have asked Dennis to consider posting all these slides as presentations under Creative Commons licenses at the Presentations Page.

As Dr. Frankestein says (and Pat quotes?): Alive! It's Alive! It's Alive!!... OpenSSO went live today (Web site, Announcement). The project builds an Open Source Access Management software for building authentication, authorization, and session management for Java and web applications and web services. Java.Net is collecting a nice collection of enterprise-quality open source communities including OpenSSO, Open-ESB, OpenDS, Portal and GlassFish, and all these efforts will work together.

I guess we will go watch our copy of Young Frankestein this evening :-) Ah, and here is the quote from the original.... How did we do these things before the internet? :-)

Added: Also check the announcement, Mark's Blog and Dennis' Blog, the team's IRC Channel, and the Wikipedia entry on SSO.