Finance Minister Lindsey Tanner yesterday announced that EDS had won an AU$25 million contract over four years to create australia.gov.au, a "one-stop-shop" for all government information and services. Users will be able to create an account and personalise the site so they can easily access information or services from different government agencies. The portal will also be able to pre-populate forms with details from their profile, and allow users to complete the forms offline. The authentication hub is based on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 standard.

IBM is pushing interoperability as a solution to enterprise identity management and authentication woes. In Version 6.2 of IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, the company has integrated a number of user-focused identity management technologies and frameworks, including OpenID, Microsoft Windows CardSpace and the Eclipse Higgins identity framework.

Fedlet is a lightweight Service Provider implementation of SAML2 SSO protocols, embeddable in a Java EE web application. Fedlet is a new feature, which will be part of upcoming Sun Federated Access Manager (OpenSSO) release.