June 24, 2009
Back in business school I was a connoisseur of fine commercials. Recently I watched a commercial for Lipton Ice Tea (note I am a teetotaler who doesn’t drink tea) and I have to admire their cleverness in coming up with names for competitor products (see the title) in their “Lipton Tea, I think I love you” commercial. (Lyrics here)
Really the names are clever although the best is the H30 – I just love it, a chemical compound that as far as I can tell can’t exist, but we all know they are making fun of flavored water. Of course I also love ordering water by requesting Di-Hydrogen-Oxide.
OK they didn’t actually have Geneva Cola it was really Milan Cola, but since I really wanted to blog about Geneva and how “I think I love [it]” well I couldn’t resist the name substitution.
Now before I pester you with anymore puns let me tell you why I love Geneva, Microsoft’s next evolutionary leap with Federation and SSO.
Of late there has been a lot of buzz about Cloud computing. But there are obstacles, when you host applications in the cloud or use SaS type applications you wind up creating new identity stores.
With Geneva your identities will be almost ubiquitous, in that you can use it anywhere and your applications built using the Geneva framework will be able to accept and use identities from anywhere that you decide to trust. It won’t matter anymore where your applications, are in Microsoft’s cloud, your cloud, or your partner’s cloud.
In short if Cloud Computing will transform the industry then Geneva is the way to get there. It certainly lowers some of the barriers
Additionally, we can use Geneva to provide SSO for apps within an organization.
Now to tie in the commercial, since Geneva also supports the SAML 2.0 protocol it even inter-operates with Hot Ball of GAS SSO, and “Fiction Books Access Manager”
http://feeds.feedburner.com/IdentityLifecycleManagerilmBestPractices