Federation Services Toolset (FST)

The Federation Services toolset (FST) adds an additional protocol capability to Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS / AD FS) that allows an organization to use its ADFS infrastructure with more partners.

Features

There are a number of different federation protocols, and they are not all compatible with one another. ADFS supports the WS-Federation protocol but does not support the SAML version 1.1 protocol. AD FS v2 does support SAML 2.0, however, it is not backwards compatible with SAML v1.1.

Many service providers can provide Single SignOn (SSO) to their websites using federation, but some support only SAML v1.1. In the case of applications such as these, the CSS Federation Services Toolset (FST) can be used to extend ADFS to include these service providers.

The service providers to which an organization might want to be able to extend federated SSO include:

Corporate travel service providers
Purchasing portals
Self-service web-based training
Other web-based service providers

Benefits

Extend your ADFS investment to solve more problems without needing to buy another federation infrastructure.
Use ADFS with partners who are using SAML v1.1.
With customization by CSS, you can also address issues where the partner systems either don't follow standards or don't interpret the standards in the same way. Customization also allows for changes to the Federation token produced by ADFS. For example, the timestamp can be customized to address interopability issues.