Microsoft has released the Microsoft® Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003, a key element of its comprehensive approach to help customers build cost-effective, end-to-end identity management solutions.

Corporate workers often have multiple usernames and passwords for various software applications, and Microsoft's new product is intended to manage and unify all of those scattered IDs.

"The challenge for customers is: How do they get that single view of the user across the enterprise?" said Michael Stephenson, a lead product manager in Microsoft's Windows Server unit.

In addition to integrating identity information across multiple platforms, MIIS makes identity management easier by automating the process of establishing and eliminating user accounts and enabling self-service password management.

"Identity management has become a core business issue for most enterprises," said Jamie Lewis, CEO and research chair of Burton Group. "Regulatory compliance, secure business-to-business (B2B) application integration and secure Web services simply aren't possible without solid identity management infrastructure.

Main competitors to Microsoft in this market include IBM, Novell, and Sun Microsystems.