Making the shift from ADFS v1 to Geneva Server

After having worked with ADFS v1 for a number of years now, and with all that has been forthcoming around the Geneva Server betas, Vittorio proposed that he interview me about the deltas between ADFS v1 and Geneva Server. So in this episode of The Id Element I find myself, somewhat reluctantly, in front of the camera. However, for those that know and love ADFS as I do, it’s important to have some tips on how to make the conceptual connections to what Geneva Server has to offer – it has sooooo much more!

One other thing I want to add that is of great importance. In the video I highlight a significant delta in that the extensibility point in ADFS was the claims transformation module. By implementing a claims transformation module you could jump into the claims pipeline and reach out to a SQL database (or whatever) in your environment to augment, transform, etc. claims at will – but you needed to do this with code. In the video I highlighted that Geneva Server has built-in support for querying attribute stores that are based on AD, LDAP directories and SQL Server – which of course is a significant step forward. One need not write code for these now.

But after viewing the video, some might be saying, “but I need to get data for claims from other sources than the built-in stores, how do I do that?” That’s where I need to say here, you still can!! Geneva Server also provides extensibility in terms of custom attribute stores where you write your own module(s) that implements the attribute store interface. Once defined and plugged into Geneva server, the custom attribute store will be recognized by Geneva server and then can be used for querying the custom attribute store for claims population, etc. A whitepaper describing this is available for download on the Geneva Connect site, the document in Downloads is, Developing Custom Attribute Stores for Geneva Server. So, here’s the full picture…

Enjoy the document, and populate claims from any source desired!!