Last Friday, I had the chance to participate in a technical walkthrough of a corporate LID implementation that I had heard about before. This enterprise decided to complement the traditional identity management technologies they have in place already (Liberty, SAML, etc.) with a user-controlled, URL-based LID implementation, for two reasons:

• They already have home pages for tens of thousands of their employees that provide information about those employees and allow visitors to communicate with those employees. Adding identity management to those home page URLs seemed like a natural extension that adds further value to the home pages and gives a user a single interface through which to interact with an employee.
• They want to represent people consistently throughout a number of applications and data feeds. If each application that knows about a person (e.g. application A knows about people who ordered certain things, are responsible for things, etc.) allows the user to click on that person, and the browser opens the person's home page (which is identity and communications enabled), things become very easy and natural, with corresponding substantial business benefits.

They decided to map logging into one's own URL onto the corporate central authentication service — which of course makes a lot of sense because it keeps their LID implementation consistent with the policies they have in place already. And profile information served by the user's URL is taken directly out of a corporate HR-type application that knows about all of those attributes already. They even have ACLs in place so that different people get to see different attributes of the same user.

I'm quite impressed. This demonstrates very well that LID (and OpenID, and YADIS and friends) are quite compatible with the needs of the enterprise, complementing it in key respects with very little overlap to what enterprises have in place already.

I wonder whether they are going to extend it to the enterprise's customers... I'm sure somebody like Doc Searls would vastly prefer to do business with companies who let him bring his own identity. It is just a matter of time until letting customers bring their own, user-controlled identity, becomes a competitive requirement.