At over half a year since the introduction of the first Beta for Microsoft's open platform for claims-based user access, the Redmond company has produced the next development milestone. Microsoft Code Name "Geneva" Beta 2 is now available for download, after the solution was introduced at Microsoft Tech•Ed North America 2009. According to the software giant, the Beta 2 means that Geneva's components all evolved over the previous release. The Geneva Server, the Geneva Framework – IDFX and CardSpace have all been kicked up a notch in Beta 2.

As far as CardSpace is concerned, Geneva Beta 2 brings to the table: “Support for Group Policy-based Information Card provisioning; updated management UI; updated card tile; group Policy-based way for administrator to make card selection decisions for specific sites; improved provisioning of X509-backed cards and compatible with most existing managed cards,” revealed a member of the Geneva team.

When it comes down to the Geneva Server, Microsoft has delivered AD RMS and SAML 2.0 SP-Lite support. Customers will be able to turn to Powershell commandlets in order to streamline their workflow, and will have available a solution that enables federating with Microsoft Federation Gateway. At the same time, the process of creating claims transformation policies has been simplified with a new rules engine. Geneva Beta 2 has been tweaked to play nice with AD, AD LDS, and SQL attributes by default, but the server can be extended with plugins for additional attributes stores.

For the Geneva Framework – IDFX, Beta 2 is equivalent with an “enhanced FedUtil Tool with local STS for easy offline development; new Visual Studio templates for building claims-aware web applications, web services, and security token services; support for SharePoint 2007; revised token handlers; revised federation authentication module; new Claims Authorization Manager API and updated config support,” the Geneva team representative added.

Microsoft codename Geneva Beta 2 is available for download here.