EDINA newsline
April 2007: Volume 12 Issue 1
The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research (or, simply, “UK Federation”) will eventually manage access to web resources for the higher and further education and research communities in the UK – and to all the primary and secondary schools in the country as well.
Before organisations can play an active part in the UK Federation they have to go through a membership process. Despite the need to negotiate these legalities, the membership of the UK Federation has been growing fast (see the membership list at the web address below).
Members of the original Shibboleth Development and Support Services (SDSS) Federation were given provisional membership of the UK Federation, but this will run out at the end of March 2007, when the SDSS Federation is due to close down.
A member organisation of the UK Federation can register any number of ‘service providers’ or ‘identity providers’. A university, for example, might register an identity provider, so that all of its staff and students are then able to use the federation to gain access to services which the University has signed up for. A service provider does just that – provides a web service.
Technical provision to install, configure and maintain the software required to be an identity provider or a service provider, can be out-sourced to a third party, as described in the federation web site.
The UK Federation web site contains copious amounts of information: implications and benefits of membership, briefing notes for senior staff, technicalities of the software, etc. Now is the time to get involved – it will affect you sooner or later.