I’ve always liked mind maps for brainstorming difficult concepts.  I find they are a great way of logically expressing, formulating and grouping thoughts that are hard to articulate.

Here’s a great detailed deployment example for something I’ve been working with a lot lately:  SAML v2 Using Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0

pat managed to get opensso up and running on amazon ec2!  details here.

download & run websynergy
scp opensso.war to glassfish autodeploy dir (on ec2)
configure as you like - in this case, an IDP and a fedlet
test w/ federation validator
test w/ fedlet sso