Last time, I talked a bit about SAML and Federated Identity . It turns out this is a subset of a general area, an area commonly referred to as Identity Management . The issue is how to protect and manage credentials across a wide array of network applications that have different authentication methods and requirements. I talked about SSO last time, mostly around SSO in browsers and web applications. As Pablo reminded me , it's not just web browsers; SAML is trying to solve the problem of SSO