Today is a big day for the Access Control Service team. M7 is now live. There are a few huge changes:

1. It is running on top of Azure (fabric and storage)
2. We incorporated a new community driven protocol and token format (Web Resource Authorization Protocol (WRAP) and Simple Web Tokens (SWT))
3. Relying Parties and Requestors can use ACS from any platform that is capable of HMACSHA256 calculations and HTTPs FORM POSTs
4. It integrates with AD FS v2 (strictly speaking this isn’t a change, but it is definitely worth mentioning
5. It also enables what I like to call Simple Delegation. In a nutshell, this allows requestors to grant others access to a relying party on their behalf.

To access the new services go to https://netservices.azure.com

The team worked unbelievably hard on this release. Special shout out to Cyrus Harvsef, Afshin Sepehri, Blaine Dockter, Dan Smiley, Ankit Patel, Arnab Ghosh, Hristina Popova,  Maciej Skierkowski, Yaron Golan, and many others for bringing this together.