It’s great to see that my old team has been humming away and have come out with a pretty big announcement. They’ve opened up Windows Live ID so 3rd party websites can use it for their authentication and integration with Windows Live authenticated services, much like Google and Yahoo’s offerings. 

It’s a bit late to the game, but better late than never!  It’s fantastic to see they even have sample implementations in Ruby, Python, Perl and PHP!

From the Windows Live ID team blog:

The benefits of incorporating Windows Live ID into your Web site include:

· The ability to use Windows Live gadgets, APIs and controls to incorporate authenticated Windows Live services into your site.

· An HTTP-based, platform-neutral interface for implementing Windows Live ID authentication in your existing site, even if it is hosted by a third-party.

· Ability to make authentication and Windows Live integration easy for over 380 million consumers.

Check out the details in the SDK documentation or download the quick-start application if you’re interested in learning more.

There has been a ton of talk lately on OpenID, especially since it has seemingly gained inroads with a lot of major industry players such as Microsoft, Verisign and AOL. Heck, even Digg is planning on supporting it.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently said:

It’s definitely time to declare OpenID a winner and the hope for a single-sign on world a reality.

When you read commentary by supporters of OpenID and the resulting press you can’t help by get the impression that it’s the savior of the internet and finally solves the authentication problems for users on the web. Some of the stated advantages:

1. De-centralized — you don’t have have to trust a single authority like Google or Microsoft.
2. Tiered authentication — websites that require stronger authentication can get users to sign in with a strong credential. It’s built into the protocol.
3. URL-based — you can keep your email address private and it saves you time when trying out new sites and services (you already know your ID is unique since no one else is using your URL identifier)
4. Multiple identities made easy — you can have multiple identities by using different URLs

The list goes on and on… When I read the above list, you can call me skeptical to say the least.

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My old team, Windows Live ID, just released the much anticipated SDK for connected rich-clients in an alpha release.  Strange that this big news hasn’t been mentioned on their team blog or on Dev.live.com yet.

“We are excited to introduce the alpha version of Windows Live ID for client applications!
The Windows Live ID Client 1.0 SDK provides a managed API for Windows Live sign-in authentication. Included in the release is a sample application with its source code, so that you can build your own client applications.

The benefits of implementing the Windows Live ID authentication service include:

• No need to worry about the technical details of authentication! The Windows Live ID authentication service manages this process for you.
• Don’t bother worrying about how to store and retrieve user account information! The Windows Live ID service uses the same functionality as Messenger to cache the user name and/or password for use in subsequent user sign ins.
• Forget about creating, storing, and maintaining user accounts! The Windows Live ID service hosts and manages the Web flows and account services to enable account sign up, credential viewing and updating, and profile management.
• Gain hundreds of millions of potential users of your application! By enabling Windows Live accounts direct sign in to your application, anyone with a Windows Live ID can become a user of your product.”

You can download the SDK here: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=347.  Send me links to any cool applications you create with it!

After 5 years, I’m leaving the Windows Live ID team to pursue a Lead PM position in the Windows Marketplace team.  While I’m sad to leave my coworkers and friends in an area that I know like the back of my hand, I’m equally excited to embark on a new adventure working in a completely different space.  The icing on the cake is that I’ll be working again for a guy, who I worked for a number of years ago.  Definitely one of the people I respect most at Microsoft.

My transition from Live ID to Marketplace will be happening over the next few weeks, with my ‘official’ last day on Live ID being October 27th. 

For those on the MS campus, I’ll be moving from 119 to 25, which spells great news since I’ll finally be able to get parking without valet!

Mark Wong and Erren Lester, two PMs on my team, wrote on our team blog moments ago about the new multi-user support on our Windows Live ID sign-in page.

The multi-user support is enabled by our “Windows Live Sign-in Assistant”  which is our IE browser add-on that is optionally installed with Windows Live smart clients like Live Messenger.

Do you have multiple Windows Live ID accounts? Do you the same Windows account with more than one person?  Do you switch between these accounts frequently?  If you answered yes to these questions, you’re in for some good news!

Today we are shipping the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant which is an Internet Explorer add-on that comes included with Windows Live Smart Clients, such as Windows Live Messenger. The goal of this add-on is to help make your sign-in experience faster and more convenient for users that have more than one Windows Live ID account.

Easily choose which account you want to use

Multiple Windows Live ID accounts are often used on a particular computer, either because multiple people share a computer (like in a family home), or, because you are an individual user with multiple accounts (for example, separate accounts for ‘work’ and ‘home’).   A key feature that Windows Live ID sign-in experience will offer is the ability for our users to save multiple credentials on their machine.   These multiple accounts will be shown as a list on the sign-in page – you’re even able to save your password for each of these accounts, eliminating the need to re-type your password everytime you want to change your identity!  (Note: if you use a shared/public computer, we do not recommend saving your password) Take a look at this screenshot taken from one of our test environments:
(click to enlarge): 

True Password Persistence!

Before the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant, the ‘save my password’ option caused your sign-in state to be persisted across multiple browser sessions (it was a persistent cookie), but hitting “sign-out” at any page would delete the cookie and the next time you wanted to log in, you were prompted for your password again. 

This was a frustrating experience for users.

With the Sign-in Assistant installed, the ‘save my password’ box will work just like it does in Messenger – it will keep the password in a local credential store (we use the Windows Credential Manager). If you’ve chosen to save your password, all it takes to sign in is a single click on the appropriate user tile. This is a huge improvement over the previous experience.  We’ve also made it very easy for you to remove your saved password, just click on “remove” link and the member name and password are deleted from the credential store.  You are in still in control of when your credentials are saved.
 

One credential list shared by Windows Live smart clients and browser applications

The list of users that is shown on the sign-in page is actually the same saved user list used by Windows Live desktop applications, meaning that if you save a credential in Windows Live Messenger, it will be shown by your browser on the Windows Live ID sign-in page!  If you choose to “save my password” on the Windows Live sign-in page, your username and password will show up on the user list in Windows Live Messenger.  This will unify the experience across Windows Live ID enabled applications.  This also means that choosing “remove” on the Windows Live Sign-in page will remove the saved ID/password for all

<continued on our team blog….>