...Federation is perhaps the most important emerging technology in SSO for governments worldwide. It is largely driven, sources say, by the need to make unconnected departments that must nonetheless collaborate, along with their equally divided IT resources, securely accessible via the Web to constituents through a single point of contact. Federation “gives people the ability to establish multienterprise levels of trust,” said David Ting, Imprivata’s chief technology officer.

OASIS has issued Calls for Vote to determine if two specification sets should be approved as OASIS Standards:

1. Metadata Profile for the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 1.x
2. Metadata Extension for SAML 2.0 and 1.x Query Requesters.

OASIS members who wish to discuss the ballot may do so through the member-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org mailing list. Primary representatives of OASIS organizations members should cast ballots before the deadline of 31 Oct.