CA and Microsoft just completed a collaborative project in which CA SiteMinder and CA Federation Manager and Microsoft's Geneva (primarily Active Directory Federation Services 2.0) worked together in three federated security scenarios.  To get the particulars of what was tested; check out the joint Microsoft and CA white paper.  This is the next logical step in our security oriented collaboration with Microsoft and shows that Microsoft is delivering on its commitment to support SAML, which I blogged about last November.

To give you a better idea of the interoperability scenarios that are covered in this paper I will give you a quick summary here.

• Case 1 - AD FS 2.0 acted as the identity provider and CA Federation Manager, in conjunction with CA SiteMinder, protected the relying party.
• Case 2 - The roles were swapped, with CA Federation Manager operating at the identity provider and AD FS 2.0 and Windows Identity Foundation for Access Control providing security at the relying party.
• Case 3 - CA SiteMinder and CA Federation Manager protected access to a Windows Identity Foundation based application.

Why is this important?  One takeaway is that organizations with IT infrastructures from both CA and Microsoft can invest with the confidence that CA's Web security solutions will continue to complement and provide security services for the Microsoft security components and development platforms, both now and into the future.

The conclusion of the paper says it best: "By enabling identity federation, as well as the mixing and matching of solution technologies in innovative new configurations, CA and Microsoft are enabling customers to maximize the value of their IT investments."