Lead by example
Posted by Jane Charlton on October 4th, 2007
Thirty JISC services attended an internal briefing event on 28th September to learn more about the UK’s plans for federated access management. During the day service managers were asked to consider joining the UK federation and to adopt new standards-based access management technology to ensure consistency across JISC services for users and to enhance current and future service provision. For example, JISC Services (even those that provide free, unrestricted access to their service) could personalise their service eg. ‘my saved searches’, ‘my favourites’ and email alerts by using federated access management software through the use of attributes. They could also use the same software to provide authorisation for other services such as for their website content management system, wikis, blogs and other social software. Two JISC Services, JISCmail and EDINA, demonstrated how they had already implemented federated access management software.
JISC itself is soon to go out to tender for a directory service that will enable JISC staff to use single sign-on for its own internal services. The directory service will act as an Identity Provider (IdP) using federated access management software. JISC Collections and Regional Support Centres (RSCs) staff will be provided with a new username and password via this service for demonstration purposes, replacing the Athens ID they use at the moment.
Services staff also learned about changes to the JISC model licence which now requires publishers to join the UK federation and adopt federated access management technology and about recent JISC development projects in the area of identity and access management.
Attendees welcomed the fairly non-technical content of the presentations and the opportunity to ask questions during the panel sessions. Feedback from the day has been very positive - one attendee said “I got more out of it than I was expecting and made useful contacts for future work.”
Presentations from the day will be up on the JISC website soon at: