Forgive me blogosphere, for I have sinned – it’s been five months since my last post! ;-) You may have wondered why my blog has been “dark” for so long, and the short answer is that I moved to a new role at Microsoft in September 2007 and at about the same time had to deal with a series of illnesses in the family, which occupied a great deal of my time and attention. Winding back to September then … After 4 years of working on Web Service Standards and Interoperability at Microsoft (involving 21 WS-* specifications, 8 Feedback Workshops, 13 Interop Workshops and 4 Plug-fests), I’ve changed roles. I’ve moved back to my software roots, and taken a technical role as a Feature PM in the Windows Live Identity Services (aka Live ID / Passport) product development team. Live ID [1], [2] is an interesting place to learn about world leading software-as-a-service - the team runs one of the biggest authentication services on the web today - handling over 400 million active users and over 1 billion transactions per day! Interestingly, much of the current and future work of the Live ID team is focusing on leveraging web services technology and appropriate standards such as WS-Trust / WS-Federation to achieve broad interoperability and deployment for Live ID technology in the industry. Web services and standards-based interoperability are playing a key role in creating a network effect around identity data, which IMHO is one of the significant themes driving forward the "Third Age of Web Services" [3]. So in some ways then, I am really just moving from the sell-side to the buy-side of the standards business! [1] http://dev.live.com/liveid/ [2] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb288408.aspx [3] http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2005/05/000357.html... Read More...