Potential Recommendations - Please add your initials to three 

Initials

Activities for the InCommon administration or TIER

 

Fully-functional outsourced Shibboleth blessed by InCommon with InCommon participating in the management of the solution.  (High value)

 

Certification of IdP support vendors blessed by InCommon.  (High value)

 

Appliances for insourced operation such as CANARIE’s IdP installer with configurations pre-built for InCommon.

SKA

Ways to facilitate InCommon members getting consultant help without a lot of administrative overhead. This might be combined with a mentor program.

SFK

Outreach to those institutions that are not engaged in federation and would not know that alternatives for an IdP exist.

 

Community solutions with InCommon coordination

 

Outsourcing an IdP to other InCommon members hosting the IdP.

SKA,SFK

An  mentor program for InCommon Members to help campuses get started.  (High value, low cost)

SFK

Second phase of the Alternative IdPs Working Group or another chartered group.
These solutions would have high value to the constituent group that the working
group was tasked in addressing, i.e., institutions that do not have local resources,
yet the work effort would not be as high as the recommendations above.

 

Develop criteria for assessing of IdP service vendors.  (High value, low cost)

 

Identify and assess vendors. This would have to done repeatedly in order to keep current and provide value.  (High value, potential high cost)

 

A cookbook on deploying the IdP strategies, including technical architecture, vendor selection, user support, operation, etc.  (High value, low cost)

SKA

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4 Comments

  1. Mark Scheible (mcnc.org)

    A few questions/comments on the above poll...

    1. Is the first item referencing an InCommon IdP of Last Resort?

    2. Doesn't the Affiliate Program provide some of what's listed under Tier/InCommon Activities? (not referenced)

    3. Maintaining any kind of vendor assessment is very risky given the maintenance overhead - the deployment cookbook could have a section on selecting vendors

    4. We've never addressed the Value Proposition for HAVING an IdP for this constituent group have we?  I think that needs to be provided somewhere for small campuses to assess the benefit of the Alternative IdP options (vs. Cost)

    1. berryj@lafayette.edu

      1) No it doesn't. This would be an institution's IdP which would be registered in the InCommon metadata.

      2) There isn't any form of certification involved in the InCommon Affiliate program. It may be an outgrowth of the program, but it isn't part of it now.

      3) Ack. That sounds reasonable. If we select a separate set of criteria for assessing vendors, though, that would probably be separate from the cookbook. Or it could be included in it.

      4) Everyone (InCommon/I2) sees this as an issue, but I don't know that it's an issue for this group to address.

  2. berryj@lafayette.edu

    Note: I removed "Deeper investigation into architectural patterns for IdP deployment." from the third category above since we fleshed out the third recommendation in that section to include it.

  3. berryj@lafayette.edu

    Added fifth item under InCommon/TIER category.