One of the most annoying bugs with Office 2.0 is that it does not support single sign-on, as was indicated in this ealier article and in the Office 2.0 bug tracker. My friend Jeff Nolan and fellow blogger Emily Chang came to the rescue this week with a couple of potential solutions.

First, MyOpenID is an online authorization service that can be used by any web service through a public API. It is supported by Apache, Drupla, Python, and Zope, as well as a couple of online applications listed there. You can read this article for more background on the technology.

Second, Naymz provides a way for people to manage their identity online. It does not offer any authentication service yet, but it would make sense for the service to add such a feature down the road should it manage to create a large-enough user base, which is far easier said than done.

Indeed, the main problem with such solutions will be one of scale. For them to be adopted by a large-enough number of sites, they will need to have a large-enough number of users. But for this to happen, a large-enough number of sites must support them. It’s not clear how we’ll get out of this catch 22, unless the larger players settle on a common platform. Microsoft failed at establishing Passport as a relevant standard, and I do not see Google venturing in that space for fears of a public outcry regarding privacy issues. Like it or not, this bug might very well be the hardest to squash.

UPDATE 6/19/2006: Good article from Dan Farber here.