Programming Microsoft's Clouds: Windows Azure™ and Office 365

Part II

Office 365

• Chapter 3: Office 365 Identity Services
• Chapter 4: Introducing SharePoint Online

Chapter 3

Office 365 Identity Services

What’s In This Chapter?

• What is identity?
• An overview of identity in Office 365
• Working with role-based administration

When you work with any application, identity is important because it provides who the users are, what permissions they have, and whether they can access the resources they attempt to access. In cloud computing, identity becomes even more critical because you have a single user wanting to access resources and applications stretching beyond the premises and into the cloud, and because you want to provide a single set of login credentials and as seamless an experience as possible.

In this chapter, you learn some of the important concerns and issues with identity in this context and what Microsoft provides in the Office 365 space to help resolve them.

Understanding Identity

Before diving into the identity system in Office 365, it is worthwhile to look at some key concepts concerning the identity management space (referred to as Identify Lifecycle Management, or ILM) and to see how cloud services impact identity management.

When you hear people talking about identity management, they’re referring to a system that identifies individuals in the system and controls access to the resources in that system. An identity management system does this through the two fundamental capabilities of authentication and authorization:

• Authentication ...