Research and Scholarship Deployment Considerations

Deployment Considerations for the R&S Category

It is important that the deployment of all InCommon services facilitate initial on-boarding processes to avoid operational and technical impediments to adoption, as described in Recommended Practices.

More specifically, R&S services generally have a broad user community, often including people who do not have a close relationship with the Service Provider, or whose IdP operators do not have a close relationship with the Service Provider. For this reason, R&S Service Providers are encouraged to consider the following guidelines:

• The R&S category is most useful to those services that do not require out-of-band negotiation with IdPs.
• The service should request a subset of R&S Category Attributes, and furthermore, the service should request only those attributes it absolutely needs. (See the section on R&S Category Attributes for details.)
• The SP should fully support SAML V2.0 Web Browser SSO profile.
• The SP should provide a complete set of User Interface Elements in metadata. In particular, a Privacy Statement and a Logo are highly recommended.
• In addition to the technical and administrative Contacts in Metadata required of all SPs, a security contact should also be provided.
• The SP should strive to provide a good, overall federated user experience. In particular, the SP should intelligently handle errors involving the release of attributes.