Microsoft and Sun on Friday provided the second update of their yearlong technical cooperation work, with Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer summing up the progress by saying they've moved from the courtroom to the lab and are now entering the market. The first update was last December, and there was scant evidence of any tangible deliverables.
But Ballmer and Sun Microsystems, Inc. CEO Scott McNealy ensured that was not the case this time round, announcing a series of measures to enhance product interoperability, including the development of new specifications that enable Web single sign-on between systems that use Liberty and WS-* Web service architectures. At a news and analyst conference in Palo Alto, Calif., on Friday, McNealy and Ballmer said the two firms had jointly developed and published two draft specifications: the Web Single Sign-On Metadata Exchange Protocol and Web Single Sign-On Interoperability Profile.
News source: eWeek
