JANET held a UK Access Management Federation Briefing on the 14 February 2008 in Glasgow. The presentations are now available for download.
Confused about Federated Access Management? Your Regional Support Centre is here to help. If you’d like to discuss any issues relating to Federated Access Management please use the contact form or give us a call on 0131 559 4112. Here is a full list of UK federation members.
What is Federated Access Management?
Federated Access Management builds a trust relationship between Identity Providers (IdP) and Service Providers (SP). It devolves the responsibility for authentication to a user’s home institution, and establishes authorisation through the secure exchange of information (known as attributes) between the two parties. For the last two years JISC has devoted a significant part of its development funding to access management issues and has adopted Shibboleth - an architecture that enables organisations to build single sign-on environments that allow users to access web-based resources using a single login. If you’re interested in implementing Shibboleth, Andy Swiffin from the University of Dundee gave an excellent presentation on the implementation process at Dundee. Slide 21 onwards gets to the nuts and bolts of the process
Why do I need to bother?
The Athens service in its current form will not be funded by JISC after July 2008. Athens (run by Eduserv) will continue to be available to institutions beyond July 2008 on a subscription basis. Institutions will need to decide how they will access their internal and external electronic resources.
Additional Resources
The McShib Forum (next meeting 11 April 2008)
JISC Federated Access Management Website
The UK Access Management Federation Website