LOS ANGELES - Microsoft is working on identity technology for its future Longhorn operating system that it hopes will evolve into a cross-platform, standard format that companies can use to secure digital relationships and share resources.

The Longhorn Identity System, unveiled for the first time at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last week, is a single storage and development platform for associating identity with applications. It includes an XML-based data structure that represents identity and an API for access.

Also: Beyond Windows-centric management

Longhorn, which isn't expected to be released until 2006, is part of an ambitious slate of products that promise to integrate Microsoft's software with .Net and Web services. It will require customers to overhaul client and server operating systems, Office and everything that runs on top. The integration plan parallels efforts by competitors such as IBM with WebSphere.

The Identity System is built on the new file store in Longhorn called WinFS, which treats identity as an object for use by programmers and end users. Microsoft hopes the concept will be ported to other platforms.

This is Microsoft's second attempt at a universal identity model, the first being Passport, which has become largely a consumer service. However, this time Microsoft says the identity system will span consumer and corporate users who will store their identity data locally and not submit it to a central repository as Passport requires.

Microsoft plans to integrate the Identity System into larger Web-services-based federated identity initiatives, including its own work with IBM and possibly the Liberty Alliance, which has a similar user-centric identity model.

Collaboration guru Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove Networks and the creator of Lotus Notes, was in the audience at the Identity System presentation and came away impressed.

"Today's business environment is a mesh, not a hierarchy. Asking someone in IT to grant access is clumsy," said Ozzie, whose company, Groove, has a partnership and investment relationship with Microsoft. "This puts sharing into the hands of people who control their personal information and have control over relationships."

Ozzie said Microsoft's challenge is execution. "There is lots of code, lots of moving parts, but the design is solid," he said.

The heart of the Identity System is the XML-based Information Card, which lets users digitally exchange data about themselves with other users or servers. At its most basic, the Information Card is a mechanism for users and organizations to recognize one another, much like today's cell phones display incoming phone numbers as an identifier.

"The Information Card is a recognition infrastructure. It's like a vCard on steroids," said Kim Cameron, architect of directory services for Microsoft. The vCard is an Internet Engineering Task Force standard for an electronic business card. The Information Card goes a step further to add policy and cryptography features. Communication is protected using technologies such as IP Security, Secure Sockets Layer and Web services protocols.

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