Over the past month, Microsoft has been more forthcoming about some of the massive investment they’ve been making in the form of their cloud-based Active Directory. I heard a bit about this a month ago at The Experts Conference from the Microsoft Identity GM Uday Hegde, most notably with a focus on the market trends that Microsoft is reacting to and anticipating with this. Here are a plethora of links to read more about what Microsoft is up to:

John Shewchuk’s blog post on Reimagining Active Directory for the Social Enterprise (part 1):

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/05/23/reimagining-active-directory-for-the-social-enterprise-part-1.aspx

Kim Cameron’s blog post on IDMaaS (Identity Management as a service):

http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1205

Mary Jo Foley and John Fontana’s Take:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-finally-goes-public-with-windows-azure-active-directory-details/12795

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/identity/microsoft-unveils-ad-azure-strategy-id-management-reset/507