# OpenAM Administration Guide
12.10. Managing Federated Accounts

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### 12.10.2. Using Persistent Federation Identifiers

OpenAM lets you use persistent pseudonym identifiers to federate user identities, linking accounts on the identity provider and service provider with a SAML persistent identifier.

Persistent identifiers are useful for establishing links between otherwise unrelated accounts.

The examples below work in an environment where the identity provider is `www.idp.example` and the service provider is `www.sp.example`. Both providers have deployed OpenAM on port 8080 under deployment URI `/openam`.

To initiate single sign on from the service provider, access the following URL with at least the query parameters shown.

    http://www.sp.example:8080/openam/saml2/jsp/spSSOInit.jsp?
     idpEntityID=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.idp.example%3A8080%2Fopenam
     &metaAlias=/sp
     &NameIDFormat=urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:persistent

For a complete list of query parameters, see `spSSOInit.jsp` Parameters.

To initiate single sign on from the identity provider, access the following URL with at least the query parameters shown.

    http://www.idp.example:8080/openam/saml2/jsp/idpSSOInit.jsp?
     spEntityID=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sp.example%3A8080%2Fopenam
     &metaAlias=/idp
     &NameIDFormat=urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:persistent

For a complete list of query parameters, see `idpSSOInit.jsp` Parameters.

On successful login, the accounts are persistently linked, with persistent identifiers stored in the user's accounts on the identity provider and the service provider.