Evaluating Benefits and Tradeoffs

The following lists are useful in helping you determine whether ID-WSF is suitable for your environment.

Benefits

• OpenSSO Enterprise provides an extensive, customizable framework for ID-WSF.

• ID-WSF consumers can leverage not only use Identity Web Services security, but can also leverage the OpenSSO Enterprise policy and access control features.

• Processing a custom web service payload can totally be independent of the OpenSSO Enterprise infrastructure.

Tradeoffs

• Developers must develop and deploy their web services along with OpenSSO Enterprise.

• If web services already exist in the environment, the developers must integrate them with OpenSSO Enterprise.

  OpenSSO Enterprise ID-WSF framework is tested in interoperable environments and certified by the Liberty Alliance. So the web services are almost certain to work in multi-vendor environments as long as the remote party is also a certified implementation.

• The lack of mobile client support with the OpenSSO Enterprise Client SDK may be a limitation. However, the primary use for OpenSSO Enterprise is in enterprise web service deployments.