Travis,
Many of the products you listed are familiar to me from the IdM space. Especially Novell and Oracle...but most of these are either an entire stack or parts of a suite. And all of them will require an identity store and authentication services, right?
For example, to use Novell or Oracle or Ping, you would still need to implement a directory or some other user store, authenticate the users somehow (IWA or login page using a service provided by the product, for instance) and then federate that user to the WIF based RP, right?
How would you suggest comparing these suggestions to an do-it-yourself ADFS implementation?
The reason I ask...
We have already build a core framework and product set based on claims, using WIF to consume those claims. We are now looking at deploying ADFS as an STS, and want to step back first and consider if there is a way to accelerate a real prod deployment. We have been using the starterSTS until now...
We need to support several options for authentication: 1) IWA into the RP using our internal AD for users within our enterprise 2) provide a way for our customer's users to login using users we own and control as their IDP (assuming a new directory for them, seperate from our internal AD), and 3) external IDPs where our customers authenticate the users and federate into us.
Option 2 is something we need some authentication service for...so since we can not get away with 100% federated SSO with external IDPs, any third party option must include authentication services.
I looked briefly at the the safewhere site and didn't see any usable details about an STS alternative working with WIF. I see some federation product(s) and a WAM product...what exactly do they offer as an STS?
Thanks for any input you might have.