Connections Outside the Organization

I was thinking about this yesterday, and after having the discussion, it was suggested to me to bring this up to IBM as an idea to consider.  The issue with taking the wonderful tools provided in Connections is that it is really designed around being deployed as an internal set of tools.  There is not user self-service in the product for things like, password reset, registration or inclusion in the solution, etc. like you find with public social tools.  What if the Connections tool set (Blogs, Wikis, Communities, Files, etc…) were to not utilize just Profiles as the user repository?  What if we could allow Connections to use Facebook, for example, as the user repository.  Trust the FB session, like other FB apps, and have FB allow the users to modify their own user information and keep it up to date on their own.  FB already provides user self-service.  Connections will still control authorization to data, security, all the things we have come to expect from an enterprise class solution from IBM would still be handled in the app.  This would make deploying Connections into an extranet much easier as we would not have to handle the user management, but leverage the user management provided in a public social network.  Just a thought, but I wonder what others in the community think before trying to speak with anyone in a meaningful way about this… let me know!