Sun and Microsoft Interoperate for Web Authentication, Part 1

In between all the talk of federation, PHP and web services, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that bread-and-butter single sign-on and access control still has huge value in improving both security and the user experience. Over at the Sun Developer Network, Marina Sum and I just published an article - Sun and Microsoft Interoperate for Web Authentication, Part 1 - focusing on how Sun Java System Access Manager and its policy agents integrate with Microsoft IIS to provide both single sign-on and access control - right down to Windows ACLs on files on disk.

As the article mentions, some functionality (specifically, the basic authentication plugin - from the ‘Configuration of the Policy Agent for HTTP Basic Authentication’ heading to the end - sorry, there is no handy name anchor in there to link to) will be released in AM Policy Agent for IIS 2.2-Hotpatch6 sometime in the next few weeks. I’ll post here as soon as this is available; at that point you will be able to work through the entire article. In the meantime, much of it works with the current policy agent, so you can get started straight away.