The Liberty Alliance Project, a consortium formed in September 2001 with a mission to develop open standards for federated identity, has announced a global Web services deployment program, a series of interactive workshops for developers and implementers of identity-enabled Web services. Designed to help organizations address the technical and business aspects of Web services, the first workshop will take place on June 12 from 8:30am – 1:00pm at the San Francisco Hilton and will feature Liberty members from Intel, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Neustar. Anyone interested in identity-enabled Web services is invited to attend this free event, organizers say.

The San Francisco workshop will include case studies and overviews that profile how Liberty's open identity specifications for Web services allow businesses to offer new functionality to their partners and customers, ease existing relationships between disparate computing systems, and provide common interfaces to systems spanning geographical locations and business functions. The next round of workshops are being planned to include interactive elements that will allow developers to leave the event with Web services code “in hand.”

“Liberty deployment workshops are about providing developers and organizations with tools and resources for implementing successful identity-enabled Web services,” said George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board and director, Platform Capabilities Lab at Intel. “With Liberty Web Services deployed by organizations that include American Express, AOL and Nokia, the workshops will showcase how Liberty’s open identity specifications are delivering real business value today.”