Codename of the day: Geneva — Best guess on what it is: An identity metasystem including a new security token service

Meaning/context of the codename: The federated identity folks at Microsoft seem to be favoring Swiss codenames as they fill out their product family. Geneva is just one of these. There’s also Zermatt (another Swiss desination). Zermatt is the programming model for Geneva. And then there’s Zurich, the .Net-based Software-Plus-Services infrastructure that Microsoft is slated to unveil at the Professional Developers Conference in late October.

Back story: Geneva is expected to be one of a number of building-block cloud services that Microsoft will deliver as part of its “Zurich” infrastructure. Zurich will be comprised of an identity service, connectivity service, workflow service, storage service, virtualization service and others, tipsters say. Sounds like the tentative delivery target for many/most of these building-block services is the second quarter of 2009.

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