Security, Management Tools That Span Company BordersSecurity, Management Tools That Span Company Borders

Microsoft plans to release software next year that lets businesses use Web services to authenticate and authorize users across their IT boundaries, a move that could bolster collaborative business.

The software, code-named TrustBridge, would let a user whose account is stored in a Windows Active Directory log on to a system behind a different firewall using Web services. TrustBridge will convert into Simple Object Access Protocol (Soap) the remote procedure calls, directory-lookup functions, and Kerberos tickets necessary to pass credentials between directories, Microsoft says.

TrustBridge will let users log on to local Active Directories, or those hosted at other companies, using Soap messages, which traverse the Internet's HTTP layer and enter companies' networks through a firewall port. Microsoft says TrustBridge will enhance Soap messages with security extensions called WS-Security, proposed in April by IBM, Microsoft, and VeriSign.

Microsoft hasn't decided how it will sell TrustBridge; it could ship as a standalone server, as part of Windows .Net, or inside a future version of Microsoft's Internet Security and Acceleration Server firewall, says Steven VanRoekel, a marketing director at Microsoft. Microsoft hasn't set pricing.

The vendor is taking other steps toward chairman Bill Gates' "trustworthy computing'' initiative, a company priority since January. The company said last week that its Passport Internet authentication software will support Soap and WS-Security by next year. And its Visual Studio .Net development environment will let developers write applications that encrypt Soap messages with WS-Security.

WS-Security is important to Microsoft because it shows the company is serious about security, says Shawn Willett, an analyst with Current Analysis. But competition between WS-Security and Sun Microsystems' Liberty initiative may cause trouble. "It would be better for users if they merged the two,'' he says.

While Microsoft focuses on security in Web services, startup AmberPoint Inc. this week is launching tools for managing Soap interfaces across multiple business applications. Other startups are releasing tools for building Web services, but AmberPoint is one of the first to aim to help companies monitor performance and track data flowing among multiple Web services, says Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst for ZapThink, a consulting firm that specializes in XML. "Everyone is doing integration, and it's getting pretty crowded," he says. "There will be some consolidation in that area."

AmberPoint's ability to compete will be tested once the big vendors start adding Web-services support to existing system-management tools, such as IBM's Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView.