The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) has produced a video demonstrating the significance of federated identity. The CIOs of the 12 member universities, including the Big Ten plus the University of Chicago, all agreed to join the InCommon Federation to make it easier for students, faculty and staff to access resources at any of the campuses.

The video is available at the CIC website:

http://www.cic.net/Home/NewsAndPubs/Publications/FederationVideo.aspx

By July 2008, all 12 universities had met the technical and policy requirements for InCommon membership. The pilot project for federation was CICme, the consortium's online collaborative workspace. Federated access to CICme was unveiled on Feb. 17 to rave reviews.

"I am really impressed with the ease of using this system," said Ruth Reingold, the Assistant Dean for Computing Technology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. "The new easy single-sign-on access is beautiful."

At Penn State, the administrative assistant to Chief Information Officer Kevin Morooney thanked him for the federation of CICme because she would never have to worry about forgetting her password again.

"Tracy is just one of thousands of people for whom (federated identity) will make it that much easier to manage workflow and access to information that's important," said Morooney, a member of the InCommon Steering Committee.

The CIC believes that the ability for its faculty, staff and students to use their own campus identities to cross organizational boundaries will springboard its collaborations to a whole new level. It is further harmonizing CIC campus policies and standards that will accelerate greatly the process of federating future, higher-stakes applications.

"The CIC as an organization saw ... the value proposition of doing federation immediately," Morooney said. "You can now get out of the business of managing identity but be in the business of enabling collaboration and information sharing, because that's what the CIC is all about."