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Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Connecting cloud apps to desktop apps using OAUTH and SAML

Enterprise Single Sign On (ESSO) solutions provide SSO for desktop apps such as Outlook by providing the storing the username/password securely and passing it to the desktop app when required.
Now, if the desktop app (such as Outlook) needs to go out to the cloud to fetch data, and the cloud app if federation enabled, then can such federation be extended to the desktop app?

Google has already solved it using OAuth for Installed Applications. The article doesn’t explicitly call out SAML, but if you have enabled SAML on your Google Apps deployment, it gets used instead.

Also, see Pat Patterson's blog entry on this topic.