Thats how many school days are left before the big switch over in access management. So right now the debate is not about open source software, 3rd stream activities, cost benefit of propriety software v non proprietary software, long term strategy etc.

The single issue of importance until August is how will your students access resources on July 31st.

1. Whatever solution an institution has chosen they need to ensure that they have joined the Federation - which means sending the letter off and CONFIRMING the JANET reply email which should follow soon after. If an institution isn’t listed on this page then the process is NOT complete.

2. If an institution has opted to use an outsourced identity provider - and are planning on using ATHENS - Shibboleth Gateway to access federated resources (such as JISC collections, material at Edina MIMAS etc), they need to check that they have nominated their outsourced provider on their Federation Membership documentation. In some cases institutions may have become Federation members before they decided on a solution so won’t have put that information on their original application. They will want to revisit their documentation and notify JANET if anything has changed.

3. If an institution is NOT joining the Federation, and they may have their reasons (such as move to use of IP and Proxy solutions only)-, please contact the team here to double check the implications….

Many of you will have seen the invitation to the Federated Access: Future Directions (no jokes about boldly going) event being held in Birmingham on 30th June 2008. The agenda is here, and we would love to see you there.

The main purpose of the event is to help us plan the next JISC programme on access and identity management. We will be holding brainstorming sessions in the afternoon to ask attendees what they would like to see in the Programme. I’d like to be able to take ideas from the community in to these meetings so we can have a solid basis to start discussion. As such I’d like to invite you all to provide suggestions for future areas of work by commenting on this posting. If you are shy, please feel free to also e-mail me directly.

To get you started, there are some ideas below. These are just ideas that have been suggested to us and comments are welcome. Our programmes are only as good as you help us make them so please do speak out.

Possible future directions for access and identity management

- a developers forum to allow for joint development of toolkits across the community with a solid coding platform and management.
- tools for librarians to manage groups.
- work to integrate attributes within ERMs.
- recommendations for extended use of attributes within institutions.
- a review of licensing of content for virtual organisations.
- more work with CardSpace and OpenID.
- a study on the importance of cultural identity and digital identity.
- pilots for pre-course access with UCAS codes.
- account linking.
- support for Shibboleth 2.0.