With the CardSpace system in Windows Vista, Microsoft is one of many companies working on new online identification systems. However, Microsoft has so far refrained from joining the Liberty Alliance, an industry consortium formed in part out of concerns over the company's original Passport log-in system.

But Microsoft has now agreed to participate in an upcoming meeting of the Concordia Project, which was conceived by the Liberty Alliance to be an independent group that encourages interoperability among business-related identity systems. The group announced this morning that Mike Jones of Microsoft's CardSpace team will take part in the meeting along with OpenID and Liberty Alliance representatives. According to the Concordia site, they will listen to case studies from AOL, Boeing and others, and then use those case studies to help figure out how to proceed.

The move follows Microsoft's embrace of OpenID earlier this year, which suggested a more inclusive approach.

Via phone this morning, here's how Roger Sullivan, Liberty Alliance president and Oracle's vice president of identity management, described the idea behind the Concordia Project:

"There are several different identity initiatives that seem to be gaining traction. As they gain more traction and as the market gets hotter and hotter, (the Liberty Alliance's) concern is that the industry will become fractured and divisive, and that folks will be forced to make a choice of one protocol vs. the other. To the contrary, we believe that each of these initiatives has value for particular use cases, and there are certain times when these use cases need to interop with one another. So the Concordia program was created first as a concept within Liberty but secondly, and now most importantly, as an independent forum where we can discuss these enterprise use cases, and then the authors or sponsors of the various identity initiatives can then go away into their own environments -- be it Liberty or OpenID or CardSpace and the Vista community -- and modify their products or technologies so that they will better interop to meet the enterprise requirements."

Sullivan said he considers Microsoft's involvement "a very strong statement of confidence, and a strong statement of trust in the fact that (the Concordia Project) really is an independent forum, that we're not trying to drive any particular organization's agenda in the market, but just have an honest and open dialogue about what legitimate use cases there are."