Hi everyone, Tore Sundelin and Lynn Ayres here. We're Program Managers on the Microsoft Identity Services team and we're very proud that some of our hard work is being disclosed this week.

Today at PDC, we announced the availability of some new identity related services and technology, specifically the Microsoft Federation Gateway (full release) and the Microsoft Services Connector (community technology preview) - both of which make it possible for organizations to easily adopt Microsoft services and applications built by third parties using the Azure Services Platform.

Adopting third party services within an existing organization typically involves a lot of preparation, migration and integration-- particularly if the organization has made investments in its own identity and IT infrastructure. In order for such services to work, an organization oftentimes creates separate identities for their employees within the service. This second set of corporate accounts has clear drawbacks, including additional security and compliance burden for IT, and retraining end users on an experience that is not seamless. Microsoft's software + services approach has solved this problem for our customers by enabling the adoption of cloud services based on their existing identities.

The Microsoft Federation Gateway is a federation hub that recognizes and brokers an organization's identities for use across disparate applications and services. Based on open standards, the hub can work with any identity provider.

To make it seamless for existing Active Directory customers to adopt applications and services, we've built a free, downloadable server component called the Microsoft Services Connector (MSC) which connects on-premises Active Directory-based identities with Microsoft services (through the Microsoft Federation Gateway). And, organizations will still maintain control of corporate identities with their existing Active Directory tools and processes. This is available today as a CTP that works against our test environment.

Come learn more at our PDC session http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB29/ and stay tuned for further announcements.

We encourage you to check out these new capabilities and give us your feedback!!

• Microsoft Services Connector
• CTP available today: http://connect.microsoft.com/servicesconnector
• Beta in early 2009
• Microsoft Federation Gateway
• Released, available today
• Whitepaper: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287610.aspx
• Quick Start guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd164396.aspx
• We want your feedback!
• Forum: http://connect.microsoft.com/servicesconnector/community/discussion/richui/default.aspx