Below are three important announcements related to the Access Control Service:

1. Extension of the promotional period of Access Control Service to December 1, 2012
2. Availability of the Access Control Service 1.0 Migration Tool
3. Deprecation of Access Control Service 1.0 on December 20, 2012

Extension of the promotional period of Access Control Service to December 1, 2012

As result of the great feedback we have received from customers regarding the Access Control Service, we are excited to announce that we have decided to extend the promotional period for the service. We are extending the promotional period and will not charge for the use of the Access Control Service (both ACS 1.0 and ACS 2.0) until December 1, 2012.

Availability of the Access Control Service 1.0 Migration Tool

In April 2011, we announced the availability of Access Control Service 2.0. This release represented a major update to the service and added new federation capabilities for web sites and web services that were not available before. In September 2011, Windows Azure Service Bus enabled built-in support for ACS 2.0, and since then all namespaces created through the Windows Azure Management Portal have used ACS 2.0 instead of ACS 1.0. Due to some differences between ACS 1.0 and ACS 2.0 described here, prior ACS 1.0 namespaces were not automatically upgraded to ACS 2.0 in 2011.

We’re excited to announce that customers now have an easy way to migrate ACS 1.0 namespaces to ACS 2.0 and try out the new ACS 2.0 features without adversely affecting their existing solutions.

Now Available: Access Control Service 1.0 Migration Tool

Today, we released a tool that enables customers who have existing ACS 1.0 namespaces to migrate them to version 2.0. This tool allows ACS 1.0 namespace owners to do the following:

• Copy the data from an ACS 1.0 namespace to a different ACS 2.0 namespace. This enables inspection and testing of the migrated settings on a different ACS 2.0 namespace without affecting the original ACS 1.0 namespace or applications that rely on it.
• Migrate the DNS name from the original ACS 1.0 namespace to the new ACS 2.0 namespace with no service downtime, after any optional testing and verification has completed.

This tool can be used to migrate regular ACS 1.0 namespaces, in addition to the ACS 1.0 namespaces used by the Service Bus.

To download and learn more about the Access Control Service Migration Tool, see Guidelines for Migrating an ACS 1.0 Namespace to an ACS 2.0 Namespace on MSDN.   

Deprecation of Access Control Service 1.0

ACS 1.0 will be officially taken offline on December 20, 2012. This 12 month period along with the ACS 1.0 Migration Tool allows customers with ACS 1.0 namespaces to proactively migrate to ACS 2.0. All customers with ACS 1.0 namespaces are encouraged to migrate to ACS 2.0 in advance of December 20, 2012 to avoid potential service interruptions. An explanation on the need to migrate ACS 1.0 namespaces used by the Service Bus, and how to prepare for it was covered in this blog post: Service Bus Access Control Federation and Rule Migration.

For more information on ACS 1.0 migration, see Guidelines for Migrating an ACS 1.0 Namespace to an ACS 2.0 Namespace on MSDN.