Microsoft is recasting ambitions for its .Net Passport identification system, saying the service now will be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a single sign-on system for the Web at large, a spokesperson said. Microsoft's repositioning of .Net Passport comes as the Web site Monster.com said it was dropping support of the authentication service. Monster, a career-development site, was one of Microsoft's banner Passport users.
Once a key part of its hosted services strategy, Microsoft has been quiet about Passport in the past few years and has not done any significant development work on the system. Instead, the company has been quietly scaling back several of Passport's components. A directory of sites that support the service was removed this year, and in March 2003, a payments feature was axed.
News source: PCWorld.com
