Announcing July 2011 update to Access Control Service 2.0

Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) 2.0 received a service update. All customers with ACS 2.0 namespaces automatically received this update, which primarily contained bug fixes in addition to a few new features and service changes:

Localization in eleven languages

The ACS management portal is now available in 11 languages. Newly-supported languages include Japanese, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.  Users can choose their desired language from the language chooser in the upper-right corner of the portal.

Rules now support up to two input claims

The ACS 2.0 rules engine now supports a new type of rule that allows up to two input claims to be configured, instead of only one input claim. Rules with two input claims can be used to reduce the overall number of rules required to perform complex user authorization functions. For more information on rules with two input claims, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg185923.aspx.

Encoding is now UTF-8 for all OAuth 2.0 responses

In the initial release of ACS 2.0, the character encoding set for all HTTP responses from the OAuth 2.0 endpoint was US-ASCII. In the July 2011 update, the character encoding of HTTP responses is now set to UTF-8 to support extended character sets.

Quotas Removed

The previous quotas on configuration data have been removed in this update. This includes removal of all limitations on the number of identity providers, relying party applications, rule groups, rules, service identities, claim types, delegation records, issuers, keys, and addresses that can be created in a given ACS namespace.

Please use the following resources to learn more about this release:

For any questions or feedback please visit the Security for the Windows Azure Platform forum.

If you have not signed up for Windows Azure AppFabric and would like to start using these new capabilities, be sure to take advantage of our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and get started today!

The Access Control Service Product Team