How I'll spend my summer nonvacation

My sister is a public-school teacher in New York. Usually I'm not envious of that job, but I always feel a twinge of the green monster right around early June. That's when she starts planning all the fun things she'll do over the next two and a half months, whereas I get to wrack my brains about things such as identity management testing.

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This summer, that's even more pertinent in light of Sun and Microsoft's porcupine lovefest last week. During this "customer event," Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy got up on stage together, and they were plenty excited to be doing so with some real meat to their announcement (unlike the last time they did this in December when the upshot was primarily warm air).

This time around the empire and the alliance held hands and announced a whole series of interoperability initiatives. The announcement that got me reaching for my precious cache of Advil Migraine (why aren't they selling these little orange drops of relief anymore?) was that the two were working on a browser-based single sign-on architecture across their two identity management architectures.

The two companies map out the communication protocol between Sun's Liberty Architecture and Microsoft's WS (Web services) architecture in two draft documents, excitingly dubbed "The Web Single Sign-On Metadata Exchange Protocol" and "Web Single Sign-On Interoperability Profile," if you feel like chewing through them.

I'll certainly have to chew through them, as InfoWorld is gearing up for a landmark identity management shoot-out test this coming August. But that brings up an interesting question I wouldn't mind tossing out to the few readers who actually got this far into the column: How do you use or intend to use identity management?

Originally we had planned a more corporate orientation for the shoot-out: Allow the vendors to plug in to an enterprise-size test network and see how their products integrate into a typical mix of enterprise applications. But in light of our two corporate lovebirds' announcement, maybe a better test design would be several applications and resources shared across multiple enterprises using identity-management solutions to manage all levels of access. Let me hear what you all think, and we'll take that into account when building the test bed. For my part, I think the second approach makes broader sense than the first, but then I've always had a multiorganizational bent.

Microsoft also announced what it counts as progress in its rather Byzantine licensing schemes. Frankly, I've tried to stay away from learning too much about this stuff since New School University started offering a master's degree in Microsoft legalese. Most companies have guys specifically trained in Microsoft licensing practices; my outfit tends to outsource that.

Upon doing some digging, however, I see that the news really isn't revolutionary. For the most part, Redmond has done some editing work, especially on its enterprise volume-licensing agreements. That document went from about 100 pages to a mere pamphlet of 44 pages. Wow. Redmond also has reorganized the products affected by volume licensing from about 70 separate products to nine product categories that cover all 70 product lines. Wow again.

Frankly, I think Microsoft is going to have to get a whole lot more radical than this in the relatively near future, especially if it's going to keep holding hands with Sun. See, McNealy's out there pushing hard the concept of utility computing, and Microsoft has all but admitted that it views utility computing as just another distribution medium. All well and good, except that the utility model of distribution doesn't lend itself at all to enterprise volume-licensing schemes as we've come to know and love them in the rainy Northwest.

Customers aren't going to want to pay for a full license when all they're doing is paying for software on a per-use model, for instance. That's one of the hidden beauties of the utility model: Unless Microsoft wants to get into the hardware business in a big way, it's going to draw the company into much closer relationships with folks such as Sun. Or IBM. Or Hewlett-Packard. Or some other hungry utility-computing resource provider. And that means friendlier and more flexible licensing schemes -- among a whole host of other things.

Hey, it may not make up for my not getting a summer vacation, but it's still going to be fun to watch.