Our pilot OpenID provider is now available for you to try – all you need to do is go to Update Profile and set up your SAP OpenID identifier. Be careful in your choice of ID though: the URL http://openid.sap.com/your_id will become your SAP digital identity, and will be used as the login ID for other sites. This means that you cannot change it once you’ve saved it to your profile – if we did let you change it, you would no longer be able to log into any of the sites that used your previous OpenID.
Once you've created your OpenID, you can try it out in two ways:
- First, just type your OpenID into your browser's address bar. This will show your SCN Business Card, which helps to verify your identity to anyone who knows your OpenID.
- Second, try using it to log into an OpenID-enabled site, such as http://demand.openid.net/ - you will be asked to log into SCN (if you're not already logged in), and then you'll be asked if it's OK to log into the requested site. Click the link, and you're onto the other site - no need to set up or remember a new password. In fact, if you've already set up an SAP Passport, then this comes pretty close to giving you single sign-on to any OpenID-enabled site on the web. Cool, huh?
Our main reason for becoming an OpenID Provider is so that we can offer a single sign-on experience for SCN users when accessing selected internal and external partner sites (such as ES Workplace and the Career Center). For these sites, when you click on the link in SCN you will be taken straight to that site and logged in automatically using your SAP OpenID. In future releases, our OpenID provider will (with your permission) automatically populate your registration details on those sites when you visit them, making it much easier to just use each site and get on with your day, without being distracted by too many registration forms. As some of you have pointed out on We are open for OpenID!, it would be good if we did this on SCN too – and it’s something we’re actively considering. The more people we hear from who want this, the more likely we are to implement it – so make yourself heard!
Finally, please bear with us in the early days of this pilot. At first, not all OpenID-enabled sites will work with an SAP OpenID – we’re trying to solve these compatibility issues, but there are many different implementations of OpenID out there, and some of them interpret the specifications a little differently. If you find OpenID-enabled sites that you want to use, and they don’t work with the SAP OpenID, just leave a comment on this blog and we’ll get around to fixing it as soon as we can.
