Twiki supports OpenID for flexible login options

Twiki Inc. announced the availability of OpenID for open source TWiki.

OpenID has been growing around the Internet as a response to the challenge of remembering multiple login and password for different web sites. Many organizations have worked together to develop the OpenID standard. It allows users the convenience of using one account at an OpenID provider to log into any sites which can act as OpenID Relying Party.

As a TWiki administrator managing existing installations you can choose to install the OpenID library which is available for download immediately on twiki.org.

The integration of OpenID 2.0 with existing TWiki installations enables users with OpenID accounts on AOL, Google, Hyves, MyID.net, MyOpenID, MySpace, NTT MyDocomo, Verisign, Yahoo or any other Open ID provider to log into TWiki seamlessly.

TWiki login screen with option to login via OpenID or TWiki internal account:

As you might know most Internet users already have at least one OpenID account at an existing provider, whether they realize it or not. Large user bases exist at Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, LiveJournal, Blogger and others. Facebook and Microsoft joined the OpenID Foundation and are working on it. Specialized identity providers such as MyOpenID and VeriSign also offer OpenID accounts. Japan's NTT Cable Internet users, half the population of the country, all have OpenID via their existing accounts.

The OpenID login functionality will be useful for public TWiki installations and extranets where people from different organizations want to collaborate more seamlessly and are not forced to remember multiple user names and passwords.

OpenID will be made available to Twiki Enterprise Agility Platform customers at a later date as an optional way to log in. Twiki Enterprise users have many internal and external partners that they collaborate with. The availability of OpenID within Twiki now offers Enterprise customers a great way to easily bring outside partners into the organization's workspace.

Many of the several thousand publicly facing TWiki sites will also potentially benefit from the OpenID code installation. For example if Google calendar or Google docs are embedded into your TWiki pages, the user will not have to log in twice if they use the OpenID login. The OpenID facilitates integration of application much more seamlessly. A person's session is noted and no second authentication is required.

The development of the TWiki OpenID integration was sponsored by a large entertainment company who graciously agreed to our suggestion that this module be released as Open Source. We were able to give back to the Open Source community; which contributed much to make this possible, and in turn were able to harness the power of crowd sourcing for ongoing code maintenance.

Check out the TWiki.org blog by Ian Kluft, who implemented the OpenID integration on the TWiki platform, http://bit.ly/twopenid.

Most providers today support OpenID 2.0. TWiki's latest integration supports OpenID 1.1 and 2.0. About four years ago an OpenID 1.1 integration was made available to TWiki, but the source code was not released to the community. With the latest integration we have released the source code to the community and also support extensive web based user and admin maintenance functionality.

The OpenID integration will be compatible with the upcoming TWiki 5.0 release, stay tuned for more.

The press release from this morning from Twiki, Inc. talks about OpenID availability on TWiki, http://bit.ly/c7ZaqL.

2010-05-03 | Jitendra Kavathekar | Category General