Tonnes and tonnes (just back from the very metric New Zealand) of OpenSSO news from the last few weeks, but this just in - OpenSSO training maestro David Goldsmith has just released a FREE (as in beer) training course: WSPL-AM-3508-D: OpenSSO Deployment . As David mentions on the OpenSSO Training Page , all you need to do is grab a My Sun account (if you haven't already got one) and get stuck in. I've been in to take a look around, and it's classy stuff - a 138 page student workbook plus a downloadable

I fly off today on my summer vacation, but I wanted to blog one last entry to point you to Planet OpenSSO ( feed ) for all the OpenSSO news over the next few weeks. We have some exciting announcements coming up - stay tuned !!!

As Arun just blogged , SOA World magazine has just announced the finalists for its 2008 Readers' Choice Awards. Sun Access Manager / OpenSSO is nominated for the ' Best Security Solution ' category. In fact, a whole bunch of Sun products and projects were nominated across several categories - Arun has a list . As Arun also mentions, it seems like SOA World haven't sorted out the voting process yet - the site still invites you to nominate products, even though nominations closed June 22, so you can't

I just uploaded my slides and photos from last week's RMLL conference in Mont-de-Marsan . This was a great event - amazing to see the strength of the open source community in France!

Via Tatsuo Kudo - Gartner recently published their latest vendor rating for Sun . The overall picture is, well, sunny, if you'll pardon the pun, but I'm particularly pleased with their ratings in the areas of Identity and Access Management and Open Source - 'Strong Positive' * for both, which means that OpenSSO and OpenDS must be doubly blessed * Strong Positive: Is viewed as a provider of strategic products, services or solutions: Customers: Continue with planned investments. Potential customers:

It's been a while since Build 4 of OpenSSO , as we work towards an early access (EA) build of Sun Federated Access Manager 8.0, OpenSSO's commercial 'twin'. Our plan designates OpenSSO build 5 as the FAM 8.0 EA, but we still have some minor issues to iron out before we're ready for EA, hence the release of OpenSSO 1.0 Build 4.5 . Here are some of the new features in Build 4.5, compared to Build 4: The Fedlet - quick and easy Federation for SP's, where you'd rather (slightly) modify your web app than

The slides for my OpenSSO presentation at Jazoon 08 (last week) are now online - just click on the link from the session page at the Jazoon 08 site . If you attended my session, you can give it a rating (out of 5 stars) at that page. You can also see my photos from Jazoon 08 in a Flickr set .

A few days ago, the good people at JavaPolis ( which now seems to be called Javoxx ) posted the video for my OpenSSO session from JavaPolis 07 at Parleys.com . Go take a look and see how it compares with the SAML 2.0 session they posted back in February.

Over the past few days, the number of participants registered at opensso.dev.java.net passed the 700 mark. It was almost exactly a year ago that we passed 400 , so we're currently adding new members at the rate of nearly one a day! Just to clarify, you can download the OpenSSO binaries and check out the source code without any kind of sign-up whatsoever. You only need to register to file issues , subscribe to the mailing lists and start submitting patches . It's not always obvious how the java.net

The Sun Developer Network 's Marina Sum spent some time recently talking to my fellow Federated Access Manager architect Rajeev Angal about Virtual Federation , a new feature forthcoming in Sun Federated Access Manager 8.0 (but available now, of course, in OpenSSO ). Virtual Federation promises to simplify federation by allowing legacy applications to interact across enterprise boundaries via a SAML 'tunnel'. Read the interview for an overview of Virtual Federation. I'll try to persuade Rajeev to