Posted 11:56 AM

InfoCard Info

Johannes Ernst (a.k.a. Mr. LID) rolled out an explanation of Microsoft's new "Infocard" in anser to his own question What is Microsoft InfoCard?

The explanation is a good, if somewhat convoluted, one. But could be simplified.

InfoCard is simply Novell's old DigitalME decentralized (as Novell's personal directory intended it to be) and hopped up on Web Services SOA.

In many ways, it could also be described as Passport without the Big Brother implications of "Hailstorm", hopped up on SOA.

The important thing to remember, I think, is that there's nothing new here except the joining together of the personal directory with the panoply of specs and protocols that make up Service Oriented Architectures. That's no small accomplishment, of course, especially for a company as vilified for it's security and privacy policies as Microsoft is.