LHA Consulting, Incorporated

At least, that's what I'm choosing to call it until there's a "real" name for it.

For those of you who weren't at DEC, you missed a demo of the next version of AD FS from one Stuart Kwan (of the Ottawa Kwans).  The demo consisted of Mssr. Kwan clicking a single button on his magickal mystery laptop...

...and then a bunch of windows flashed up on the screen and went away again before you could see what they were doing, after which, *poof*!  AD FS had just kind of...happened. 

"Whoa, hang on a minute", says I, "that's gotta be hand-waving.  There's got to be more to it than that...right?"  "Not so much, really, no", says Qui-gon Kwan. 

At which point my head basically exploded.  For reasons that I had a hard time explaining at the time, the notion of a "one-click AD FS" scared the boots off of me.  I'm now thinking that this was my AD admin brain talking, in terms of "But this is a trust relationship¹, I'm giving some random organization the ability to get to my stuff and I'm not even needing to think/work all that hard to do it!"

I mentioned this on an ActiveDir thread yesterday, and Joe Kaplan² had the following to say, which put it in perspective while simultaneously making me snort iced tea through my nose³ from laughing so hard:

"Once you've actually been doing federation for a while, the thing that
will scare you more is contemplating all the meetings you have to
attend to get one of these things set up for what amounts to a 2
minute configuration change on the server.  I for one welcome our new
push button federation setup overlords.  :)"

[1] Albeit not in the Active Directory sense of the word.

[2] One of the smartest AD FS people I know.

[3] Yes, that's as uncomfortable as it sounds.