Microsoft and Sun have agreed on a new single sign-on specification that could be used to provide, for the first time, a truly effective and workable system of cross-platform identity management. With their anti-trust battles of one year ago firmly behind them, the two companies have pledged to work together to improve interoperability between the companies' systems. They are, jointly, developing single sign-on specifications for both .Net and Sun's Java Enterprise System environment that work within a company's firewalls and with suppliers and partners.
"We've integrated the security environment, enabling you to essentially form an integrated view of users, security and IDs between the Sun world and the Microsoft world. That's a very important piece of work that we have done in the first 12 months." - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.