Pilot target constituents: Primarily three K-12 School Districts integrated with UEN Educator portal and resources.
Pilot Scope: There would be two IdPs, one that UEN would host for educators registered in UEN educator database, and one that the regional service center would host for the 3 districts. There are over 50,000 registered educators in the UEN database. School district number will be considerably smaller in size.
Initial Pilot Goals: UEN's goal would be to stand up a Federated Identity Provider service and migrate UEN's Educator Portal (my.uen.org) to use this service as its central authentication and begin migrating other UEN services to it for the same purpose.
Targeted start and end dates for initial pilot: Software development for making UEN’s portal capable of being a federated SP service was finished as of Jan 2014. This capability is now functional.
Post-pilot longer term goals: UEN would like to add additional IDPs at other public education districts and HE institutions . WOuld alsoplan to add additional services to the UEN SP for both public and HE. And help educate and facilitate those with additional IDPs that they can work with other SPs (not just UEN) on a regional, state or national basis.
Federation model selected for project: The pilot will be to prove out decentralized federated ID, however UEN currently has a pseudo central ID repository with the current registration that resides with the Educator portal and it services. As UEN’s education communities deploy IdPs the educators associated with those entities will transition to their local identity for authentication with UEN’s services that are SP enabled.
InCommon Affiliate assistance/role in pilot: none.
Targeted applications or cloud services: UEN’s Educator Portal, Contact DB and eMedia services.
Status as of Feb. 2014: Service Center in SW Utah is committed to putting up an IDP. Working with them to bring that online. Then will work with them to be sure they have credentials into the UEN SP. That should happen by end of March 2014. Initial pilot will be finished at that point. Then will look to go beyond the initial pilot.
Challenges as of Feb. 2014: Some of our services are not SAML2 complaint, Must figure how to update or migrate to a SAML2 compliant service. Working to get the regional service centers and districts to understand the value proposition and the trust fabric. Need to bring them along and get them to commit to putting up an IDP.
Cost can be a barrier. Some do not have the inclination given competing priorities.
Challenge is to get board and stakeholders to understand the value. We want to get to where federated Identity is an official recognized service of UEN.