SAML, simplified

Next week I’ll be off to Atlanta for the annual North American XML conference, and I can’t wait. Sometimes I feel like a “write-only device,” without enough time to learn new ideas from others and reflect on them. This conference is an excellent way to fill up on new ideas, discuss and morph them, and make new connections (okay, and drink beer with friends, too). I have yet to plan the sessions I’ll be attending, though I gather others have done so.

I’m speaking this year on Federated Identity Management: An Overview of Concepts and Standards; roughly what I’ll be covering is the SAML V2.0 problem space and some of its solution space, at a middling level of technical complexity. My speaking companion in this session is Yvonne Wilson, who will be sharing a Liberty Federation Deployment Case Study. I think these topics make an excellent pairing. We’re on at 2pm on Tuesday. If you need to get up to speed on privacy-enabled ways to share identity information across distributed-computing chasms, be there!

The paper I’ve written for the conference turns out to be a pretty good companion for the SAML Basics slides that I’ve already made available at the SAML group site. I’m hoping to revise both the slides and the paper once I get through the conference to make a cohesive whole. At the least, I’ll blog a link to the conference paper whenever IDEAlliance makes the proceedings public.

By the way, I hear tell that Len Bullard will be at the conference for the second time in as many years. He and I have some jamming to do; anyone else interested?