Integrating Web Tools at The University

of Washington and Beyond

 

For the Shareable and Transparent Identity Management

 

The CSU Digital Marketplace initiative has pronounced federated identity to be its number one technology challenge over the next 12 months.  The University of Washington showed OiW participants that the state of cross institutional authentication via Shibboleth makes this challenge highly addressable.  We will follow closely the UW's Shibboleth roll-out this Fall.

 

Original Showcase Description:

 

The University of Washington is implementing Shibboleth to provide cross institution integration.  This OpeniWorld showcase will cover technical and design solutions being developed through this project.  The Catalyst Research & Development group at the University of Washington (UW) produces Web tools for education and research.  While its user community encompasses all faculty members, instructors, students, researchers, clinicians, and staff on all of UW's three campuses, many within this community wish to use Catalyst Web Tools to collaborate with colleagues at other institutions.  This desire has created a need to move beyond UW's traditional institutional login method currently employed for Catalyst Web Tools.  UW is currently implementing Shibboleth to provide this cross institution integration.

 

"Many of our users have extensive working contacts outside of the UW, including colleagues at other universities, guest lecturers from industry or the community, researchers and clinicians in a variety of institutions, and students in non-traditional roles," said Tom Lewis, Director of Catalyst Research and Development.  "Being tied to our UW NetID login system has greatly reduced the value of Catalyst Web Tools for these users, or has required them to go through extra effort to get credentials for their colleagues and partners outside the university."

 

Shibboleth allows these colleagues and partners to use their own institutional credentials to collaborate in the UW online context.  Second, it affords guests access to this online environment through low assurance identity providers such as ProtectNetwork.

 

Shibboleth is being made a core component of UWs Catalyst Web Tools application development framework.  From a user perspective, the integration with Shibboleth will mean that in any circumstances where they can control access to their tools or invite people to participate int heir online contexts, they will be able to include people from other institutions, or from the community.

 

"This is an exciting and important showcase for OpeniWorld," said Jeff Merriman, Executive Director of O.K.I.  "It illustrates a solution to one of this year's more critical challenges, 'Shareable and Transparent Identity Management,' and shows the significant progress being made in this area."