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Confused about ACS. Is it like OpenID? RRS feed

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    I've read that ACS can be used to authorize users between various identity providers and a RESTful web service.  The identity providers can be Windows Live ID, Active Directory, or maybe Google, Yahoo, etc.

    I'm confused about what this means in practice though.  I have an ASP.NET website.  If I host it in Azure, can I use ACS to allow users from many different identity providers to sign on?  Or, is it only for authorizing users to WCF Data Services?

     

    Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:06 AM

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    You can very well use ACS with your ASP.NET application. ACS works with any application be it ASP.NET, Java based or php and also with Web services.

     

    I wont say ACS is like OpenID (if you are talking about protocol). However, you can use ACS and let users login to your application with any Identity Providers of your choice be it Windows Live ID, Google Id, Yahoo, Facebook and even from your on-premise AD.

     

    It just like you outsourced authentication and authorization to third party rather than implementing it on your own. This third party in this case is sitting on cloud and is called ACS. Please note that essentially ACS only do authorization and again outsource authentication to identity providers such as google, facebook etc (which is their responsibility to authenticate).

    TechyFreak
    • Proposed as answer by freaky roach Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:55 AM
    • Marked as answer by dn2009 Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:32 PM
    Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:54 AM