[OpenID board] upcoming Google announcement regarding OpenID

Wed Jul 8 18:47:00 UTC 2009

Yes, I now realize I mistakenly posted this to the public instead or private
board mailing list :-)  Not a particularly big deal since we have been
discussing this planned launch in the discovery community.
Feel free to respond on either the public or private mailing list.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Eric Sachs <esachs at google.com> wrote:

> Below are drafts of two blog posts we will make in the upcoming weeks about
> the fact that we are now operating an OpenID IDP for the million+
> schools/enterprise/ISPs that are outsourcing their email to Google Apps.  We
> would appreciate this not being circulated beyond the board until it is
> public.  This new support required that we work with the community to define
> some extensions to the OpenID discovery process.  While those discussions
> have been going on in the community the last few months, those extensions
> are not yet formalized and probably won't be until they are proven in
> production environments.  There is the potential for some community members
> (or press) to assume (or at least imply in articles) some evil intent by
> Google to co-opt OpenID with these extensions.  It would be nice to have a
> blog post on the formal OpenID blog that was supportive of our approach, so
> I wanted to see if the board members are comfortable with that.
>
> On a somewhat related point, I also expect this will further increase the
> pressure on us as a community to find more scalable UI options since the
> Nascar style approach obviously cannot include buttons for these million new
> IDPs.  We have also just posted a set of summary UI guidelines that we will
> be referencing from our API documentation at
> http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin/summary.  The goal was
> to keep it to one-page which forced us to cut additional background
> information, but if you think we cut something critical, let me know.
>
> Enterprise blog: Google Apps + OpenID = identity hub for all your SaaS
>
> We are happy to announce that the Google OpenID Federated Login API<http://code.google.com/apis/apps/sso/openid_reference_implementation.html> has
> been extended to Google Apps accounts used by businesses, schools, and other
> organizations. The service is important not only to the individuals in those
> organizations, who can interact with a variety of consumer websites with a
> single credential <add link to Google code post>, but also to the
> organizations themselves, who are increasingly reliant on multiple Software
> as a Service (SaaS) solutions from different vendors.
>
>
> For these organizations, Google Apps can now become an identity and data
> hub for multiple SaaS providers. When integrated with partner solutions such
> as XXX from XXX, the Google Open ID Federated Login API enables a single
> Google Apps login to provide secure access to services like Salesforce.com,
> SuccessFactors, and WebEX, as well as B2B partners, internal applications,
> and of course consumer web sites. See XXX's post <add link> to learn more
> about their implementation and view the demo and case study <add links>.
>
>
> Another early adopter is XXX, a SaaS project management vendor who uses the
> new service to make it easier for any organization using Google Apps to sign
> up for and deploy XXX o their users:
>
> < INSERT SCREEN SHOTS>
>
>
> Activating the OpenID Federated Login service for your domain is simple and
> secure. To achieve that, we introduced a new experimental discovery
> protocol<http://groups.google.com/group/google-federated-login-api/web/openid-discovery-for-hosted-domains> addressing
> some of the challenges with the current version (2.0) of OpenID<http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-2_0.html>
> :
>
>
>
>    - Reducing the hassle of hosting discovery documents on the domain
>    web-site - the discovery protocol offer a solution that allows a hosted
>    domain to become an OpenID Provider without hosting any documents at all.
>    Optionally, a domain may choose to host one simple file to support a more
>    complete discovery flow.
>
>
>
>    - Being an OpenID Identity Provider requires strong security protection
>    again attacks that could modify web pages on the site. To avoid that
>    requirement for businesses and organizations, we introduced digital
>    signatures on the discovery documents and a verification flow to support
>    that.
>
>
> You can find more details in our API<http://code.google.com/apis/apps/sso/openid_reference_implementation.html>
>  and Discovery<http://groups.google.com/group/google-federated-login-api/web/openid-discovery-for-hosted-domains> documentation,
> or join the discussions in the Google Federated Login API Group<http://groups.google.com/group/google-federated-login-api/web/oauth-support-in-googles-federated-login-api>,
> where you can ask any question and get answers from with other Identity
> Providers, Relying Parties and Google engineers.
>
>
> *The OpenID Federated Login Service is available for all Google Apps
> editions. However, it is disabled by default for the Premier and Education
> and editions  , and it requires the Domain Admin to manually enable it from
> the Control Panel. So Admins - go turn this today for your users<http://code.google.com/apis/apps/sso/openid_reference_implementation.html#cpanel>.
> At Google.com - we already enabled it for our employees... *
>
>
> Google Code blog: Over a million new OpenID Identity Providers !We are
> happy to announce that the Google OpenID Federated Login API<http://code.google.com/apis/apps/sso/openid_reference_implementation.html>
> has been extended to Google Apps accounts used by businesses, schools, and
> other organizations.  Individuals in these organizations can now sign in to
> 3rd party websites using their Google Apps account, without giving away
> their credentials. In addition to the value for the end-users, the new
> service also benefits the organizations themselves, who are increasingly
> reliant on multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions from different
> vendors. For example, XXX is an early adopter, allowing any organization
> running Google Apps to more quickly sign up for and adopt their service:
>
> << INSERT SCREEN SHOTS>
>
>
> See our post on the Google Enterprise Blog <add link> to learn more about
> the opportunities for the organizations.
>
>
> Supporting the API for Google Apps accounts is exciting news for the OpenID
> community <http://www.openid.net/>, as it adds numerous new trustworthy
> Identity Provider (IDP) domains and increases the OpenID end user base by
> millions. In order to allow web-sites to easily become Relying Parties for
> these many new IDPs and users, we defined a new discovery protocol<http://groups.google.com/group/google-federated-login-api/web/openid-discovery-for-hosted-domains>.
> The protocol allows Relying Parties to identify that a given domain is
> hosted on Google Apps and securely access its OpenID Provider End Point. The
> current proposal is an interim solution, and we are participating in several
> standardization organizations, such as OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org/> and
> the OpenID Foundation <http://openid.net/foundation/>, to generate a
> next-generation standard. Since the current protocol proposal is not
> supported by the standard OpenID libraries, we provided an implementation of
> the Relying Party pieces at the Open Source project - step2.googlecode.com<http://code.google.com/p/step2/>.
> Google is also offering a set of resource addressing the issues of designing
> a scalable Federated Login User Interface. You are welcome to visit the User
> Experience summary for Federated Login<http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin/summary> Google
> Sites page, where you can find links do demos, mocks and usabilty research
> data.
>
> Prefer an out-of-the-box solution? We have been working with JanRain<http://www.janrain.com/>,
> a provider of OpenID solutions, which already support the new API as part of
> their RPX product <http://rpxnow.com/>. As demonstrated by UserVoice<http://uservoice.com/session/new>
>  using JanRain's RPX <http://rpxnow.com/>, a user simply types in her
> Google Apps hosted domain name in the OpenID login box and everything else
> is being taken care of:
>
>
> <Add UserVoice (or other proposed RPX website) screenshots>
>
>
>
> You can find more details in our API<http://code.google.com/apis/apps/sso/openid_reference_implementation.html>
>  and Discovery<http://groups.google.com/group/google-federated-login-api/web/openid-discovery-for-hosted-domains> documentation,
> or join the discussions in the Google Federated Login API Group<http://groups.google.com/group/google-federated-login-api/web/oauth-support-in-googles-federated-login-api>,
> where you can ask any question and get answers from with other Identity
> Providers, Relying Parties and Google engineers.
>
> *The OpenID Federated Login Service is available for all Google Apps
> editions. However, it is disabled by default for the Premier  and Education
> editions, and it requires the Domain Admin to manually enable it from the
> Control Panel. So Admins - go turn this today for your users<http://code.google.com/apis/apps/sso/openid_reference_implementation.html#cpanel>.
> At Google.com - we already enabled it for our employees... *
>
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