Minutes from vendor subgroup - 5-29-09
Attendees
Andy Ingham
Joy Verroneau
Jonathan Lavigne
Adam Chandler
Ann West
Foster Zhang
Kent Percival
David Kennedy
notes by Kennedy
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Agenda
- Discuss vendor approach
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Kennedy drafted a vendor contact email prior to the call
Comments and discussion ensued on the contact email:
Email contained mention of SessionInitiator as a key component of the implementation. We have as yet provided no documentation of the recommended use of SessionInitiator, and a perusal of the Shibboleth wiki provides only a few bits and pieces of technical information on SessionInitiators. We agreed in a previous call to document this as part of best practices for vendors.
Another comment about the SessionInitiator. The initial contact with vendors should be to get them engaged in the dialogue. And a demand up front for the SessionInitiator might get them less interested. Agreement on this.
The first step should be to draw vendors in, maybe we should be engaging their marketing people.
Maybe we should leverage the people we have on our respective staffs that already deal with these vendors as a starting point for contact.
Another idea was that we should be using the administrative contact for these vendors that are registered with InCommon. These are people that have already bought into the concept of federation, and InCommon in particular.
West proposed the idea the letter we send be composed somehow on InCommon letterhead, and have the signature of senior IT official at our respective institutions. Discussed who this would be at our institutions, and most agreed that we could probably get such a signature from a senior library official.
Percival proposed a phased approach that had a lot of agreement.
Phase 1 - initial push to get vendors into the registry
Phase 2 - work with these vendors on best practices
Phase 3 - encourage other vendors to participate
We had a discussion of the Registry. West pointed out an existing registry, https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/InCCollaborate/Federated+Services+Offered+Through+InCommon. We had some discussion about whether these two should be merged. Since we know that we don't know everything we need to know about our registry as it is very formative now, decided to keep these entities separate for now, but it may make sense to merge them in the future.
Foster Zhang reported on some of the recent work he has been doing with vendors. Ingham did as well. We decided to start collecting this information now in the registry.
Moving forward, we decided on the following:
[AI] Continue to modify the text of the initial contact email
[AI] Continue to update the registry as we have individual contact with vendors.
[AI] Document SessionInitiator as a best practice