There has obviously been a lot of debate in the last two days surrounding the regrettable announcement that JISC will no longer be funding the Federation Gateway Services. This has lead to people asking questions such as ‘why did we go down this Shibboleth route at all?’. I thought it might be useful to go back to the beginning. Below is the vision statement (we are very MSP here) for the Access Management Transition Programme. I think it sums things up quite nicely.

The JISC Access Management Transition Programme aims to change the access management landscape within UK Further and Higher Education from a system predominantly based on proprietary systems to one with open standards at its core. The primary enabler of this change will be the introduction of federation access management and a strong recommendation to all institutions and organisations involved in education to implement access management solutions based on the SAML (Security Assertion Mark-Up Language) standard.

In supporting an open standards approach, rather than any particular technology, JISC hopes to:

Improve the business decisions made by institutions in relation to identity, access and resource management

Increase the commercial choice to institutions in relation to identity and access management technologies.

Reduce the impact and cost of vendor lock-in within the JISC community.

Embed knowledge within the community, rather than within any one organisation.

Place the principles of the JISC Information Environment at the core of the implementation of access management within its community.

Move towards a single sign-on environment for UK Further and Higher Education institutions across internal, external, and collaborative resources.

The JISC Access Management Transition Programme runs from July 2006 – December 2008, and is funded and supported by the JISC Integrated Information Environment Committee (JIIE). Funding of £2.2 million has been allocated to this programme.