In July we announced that the Google OpenID Federated Login API has been extended to Google Apps accounts used by businesses, schools, and other organizations. The service is important not only to individuals, who can now use their single Google Apps Account to sign in to a variety of websites without sharing credentials, but also to the organizations themselves, who increasingly rely on multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions from different vendors.
For these organizations, Google Apps can now become an identity hub for multiple SaaS vendors.
For these organizations, Google Apps can now become an identity hub for multiple SaaS vendors.
In fact, since July a number of vendors have used this API to add support for single-sign-on with Google Apps Accounts, including ZoHo, Tripit, Smartsheet, Socialwok, and Manymoon.
These vendors are reporting increases in registration rates after deploying this feature, and today we announced new features for this API to make these implementations even more powerful.
When integrated with partner solutions such as PingConnect from Ping Identity, OpenID support can be extended to other services like Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, and WebEX — as well as B2B partners, internal applications, and of course consumer web sites. See Ping Identity's post to learn more about their implementation and view their demo and Data Sheet.
The OpenID Federated Login Service is available for all Google Apps editions. However, it is disabled by default for the Premier and Education editions, and it requires the domain administrator to manually enable it from the Control Panel.
