Sun and Microsoft announce fruits of their partnership

By Steve Malone

Posted on 16 May 2005 at 11:48

One year since Sun and Microsoft kissed and made up after many previous years of acrimony, CEOs Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy have announced the first fruits of their co-operation deal.

Last year the two companies buried the hatchet after years of public name-calling and lawsuits. In what was seen as a public shift by Microsoft, the Redmond company paid Sun a total of $2 billion to settle their differences.

Apart from what was clearly a strategic decision to turn its attention away from lawsuits to technology, the companies were getting feedback from their customers saying they did not want them at each other's throats but rather wanted them to co-operate.

Publicly, Microsoft and Sun say they are getting on just fine. They asked their mutual customers what they wanted and, to no one's surprise, the customers said they wanted increased interoperability and single sign-on (SSO) between the two product lines. A year after the truce the issue of identity management has been addressed.

'Single sign-on experience between the Solaris-based Operating System, Sun Java Enterprise System and Microsoft Windows Server has been customers' top request.,' explained McNealy.

The companies have announced that they have jointly developed and published two draft specifications known as Web Single Sign-On Metadata Exchange (Web SSO MEX) Protocol and Web Single Sign-On Interoperability Profile (Web SSO Interop Profile).

These new specifications will permit browser-based Web SSO between security domains that use the Liberty ID-FF and WS-Federation. Previously, incompatibility meant that users who used the protocols had to sign in twice. Microsoft and Sun said they would support the new specifications within their product lines including Microsoft Windows Server and Sun Java Enterprise System.

In case anyone else involved in the Liberty Alliance WS-Federation development feel they are being railroaded, Microsoft and Sun say they 'welcome participation in the further development of these draft specifications' and will submit them to a standards organisation for ratification as industry standards.