Las Vegas – Microsoft Tuesday laid out a vision for Active Directory in which it will take on a major role in pushing out user identity data to applications and securing collaboration between users.

“We are moving from being a directory provider to an identity provider,” said Stuart Kwan, director of program management for identity and access at Microsoft, during the second day keynote at the annual NetPro Directory Experts Conference.

He said the benefit for corporate users would be a standard user access mechanism that would benefit application development, access management and allow companies to more easily spread their identity systems.

Kwan concluded that Active Directory was so close to fulfilling its original goals as a trusted directory service for corporate users that it was time to look ahead and envision the next set of challenges.

The new challenges, Kwan said, will put the directory in a key role in Microsoft’s Identity Metasystem, a model for distributed identity architecture. Coupled with an emerging technology called Security Token Service (STS), which handles the exchange of identity data, Microsoft envisions an architecture that pushes identity data out to applications that know how to interpret and act upon that data.

Today, applications typically pull user access data from the directory to determine a user’s access rights. The push model not only affords network efficiencies but more easily ties identity and application development, puts less stress on the directory, provides more flexibility in defining a user and their rights and gives the ability to federate identity with those outside the corporate network.

Kwan said the push mechanism would be similar to the way group membership data for a user is automatically included in today’s Kerberos authentication process.

In the future, identity data coming from the directory would be transformed by the STS gateway into a properly formatted “claim” or a set of claims about the user and his access rights.

“Claims transformation is the logic that takes incoming data about people in the organization and turns it into claims that are needed by the application,” said Kwan.

He says the relationship between the directory and the STS means the application knows in advance the kind of data it will be getting. And that means claims can come from inside or outside the organization.