Just six months after reaching the milestone of 2 million end users, InCommon today announced that its community now includes more than 3 million end users and 141 organizations.
InCommon is the first nationwide identity and access management federation for higher education. In an identity federation, members agree on a set of shared policies, trust-establishing processes, and technology standards. This greatly streamlines collaboration among multiple organizations.
In one significant highlight, all of the members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation - which includes all of the Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago - are now members of InCommon. The CIC plans extensive use of the federation as its member institutions greatly expand opportunities to collaborate, and develop and share digital resources.
"Colleges and universities, as well as companies and non-profits that provide services to higher education, realize the value of a federation," said Lois Brooks, Director of Academic Computing at Stanford University and chair of the InCommon Steering Committee. "This significantly reduces duplication of effort and allows campuses, both large and small, to have greater control over our users' personal information while providing a relatively simple way to share online materials and critical applications."
Colleges and universities participate in the federation to simplify their processes and make it easier for their students, faculty and staff to use a variety of resources for which the institution has contracted. Through InCommon, individuals can use their university ID and password to log in to such off-campus services as course management systems, library databases, multimedia content, and career center systems and tools.
Because individuals use their campus credentials, the providers of these resources no longer need to maintain individual user accounts, since they can provide protected content to multiple campuses and universities using a shared single sign-on system.
"Exponential growth in mobile computing, social networking, and scholarly collaboration, has created new challenges for universities to develop secure and scalable environments that can effectively allow these collaborations to happen," said Brooks. "InCommon addresses these challenges by partnering with universities and together providing the necessary infrastructure to interconnect these services and resources in ways that encourage the free flow of scholarship."
For more information on InCommon and a full list of participants, visit: http://www.incommon.org