Federated identity 101: The allure of federated identity on the Web is enticing for IT admins. It "enables one organization to serve as an identity provider for another frees IT from having to manage the identities of partnering organizations' employees and customers, thereby facilitating the pursuit of competitive-advantage projects," notes Test Center Contributing Editor Phil Windley. Windley not only delivers Federated identity 101: The allure of federated identity on the Web is enticing for IT admins. It “enables one organization to serve as an identity provider for another frees IT from having to manage the identities of partnering organizations’ employees and customers, thereby facilitating the pursuit of competitive-advantage projects,” notes Test Center Contributing Editor Phil Windley. Windley not only delivers an overview of federated identity; he hones in on OpenID and CardSpace, which stand proudly at the forefront of user-centric identity. Check out our entire special report one the subject, including podcast interviews, right here.Microsoft vs. Kennedy: There’s nothing like a bit of controversy to kick of the week, and lo, some appears to be brewing between the Redmond giant and InfoWorld Enterprise Desktop blogger Randall Kennedy. The short of it is, some techies at exo.performance.network ran some benchmarks comparing Vista performance to XP, and they determined that Vista pretty much sucks by comparison. Microsoft fired back by attacking the benchmark used in the analysis, called OfficeBench. Thing is, Kennedy himself developed OfficeBench years ago, and its gained notoriety in the IT world. Kennedy’s not taking Microsoft “baseless” criticism lightly and has thrown down the gaunlet: “I hereby formally challenge Microsoft to prove that OfficeBench, as executed by the exo.performance.network research staff, is not a valid measurement of cross-platform, cross-version performance under Windows and Office.” Will Redmond bite?10 techs for a greener datacenter: At the risk of shamelessly promoting my own work, I discovered a great (and free) white paper from Emerson Networks the other day the outlines some interrelated technology strategies to reduce costly energy waste in the datacenter. I wrote about it in my Sustainable IT blog, and I suggest that datacenter operators download the Emerson paper itself. Technology Industry