Federation Manager is the web portal for administering the InCommon metadata. Participants and Federation Operations staff use this application to register, update, and publish metadata. 

Federation Manager is used by Site Administrators responsible for creating and maintaining SAML metadata on behalf of their organization.

How does Federation Manager work?

Each Participant organization designates up to 2 authorized individuals to manage metadata on its behalf. These individuals are called Site Administrators. 

The metadata submitted by a site administrator is vetted and approved by the InCommon Registration Authority (RA).  The RA checks submissions to make sure  that the entity ID and endpoints (IdP SSO Settings, SP SSO Settings) in metadata meet accuracy and information integrity requirements.

Designate Site Administrators

Upon joining the InCommon Federation, a participant needs to is designate one (preferably two) Site Administrator(s) to manage metadata. Beyond the obvious advantages of having a trained administrator for backup purposes, multiple Site Administrators has security advantages as well. Like password changes, metadata updates generate email notifications to all designated Site Administrators, which helps prevent both honest mistakes and malicious activity.

Using Federation Manager to manage your metadata

• Add a new Identity Provider
• Update an existing Identity Provider
• Un-publish an Identity Provider from the InCommon metadata
• Declare support for Research and Scholarship category
• Declare Sirtfi compliance
• Hide an identity provider from discovery

• Add a new Service Provider
• Update an existing Service Provider
• Un-publish (deactivate) an Service Provider from the InCommon metadata

Diving deeper

The following deployment strategy forces all protocol traffic over the front channel, which is easier to troubleshoot, manage, and maintain.