RPX and Google Apps for Domains OpenID

Our mission with RPX is to help new visitors register and returning members login to your website quickly and easily.

With recent updates from Google, we are excited to extend our RPX services beyond the consumer web to offer easy sign-in to the millions of businesses, schools, and other organizations using Google Apps For Domains. Google now lets each of its customers enable OpenID provider support for their domain, which then makes it possible for members to sign-in to OpenID enabled websites using an OpenID from their own domain.

For example, we use Apps for Domains services here at JanRain, and can now simply type "janrain.com" to sign-in to OpenID enabled websites:

Typing our domain into the dialog box triggers the standard OpenID authentication process. The user is redirected to the appropriate Google Apps Domain to authenticate, as seen below:

Upon authentication on the first visit, a user will complete the transaction with Google by authorizing access to account information.

We're excited about this for many reasons:

• This is the first offering we've seen in the OpenID space that issues OpenIDs to groups of people en-masse. Over a million companies will now be OpenID-enabled, and have the potential to access all the web services that their employees use through simple one click sign-in.
  

• We've been working with Google to make sure Apps for Domains customers have a great user experience signing in to RPX based websites. All RPX customers are now able to accept sign-ins from anyone using Apps for Domains.

• Membership verification. Using apps for domains and OpenID, not only can you have a safe and simple login experince, you can verify membership of a group or organization at the time of login for access control purposes. For example, it's easy to only let people with OpenIDs from janrain.com login to your site. You can just create a button, point it at the RPX REST API, and then verify the domain of the user's identifier after authentication
  

If you are interested in using Apps for Domains OpenID for authentication to your organizations other web services, we'd love to talk with you.