COmanage Developers List

[Niels van Dijk <>]

Hello Alex,

SURFnet, the Dutch National Research and Education Network, has indeed
been involved with Lifewatch within The Netherlands, we e.g. reviewed
their technical architecture proposal.

I have forwarded this e-mail to my colluege Remco, how was directly
involved, and would be happy to update you on who we were talking to,
and what has been done until now.

As Ken's email describes, Internet2 and SURFnet are actively working
together in trying to support Virtual Organizations like Lifewatch. We
try to sync as many things as possible, both on a technical as well as a
non-technical level.

We look forward to active engagement between NREN and VO communities,
especially international ones, as these tend to have the most
challenging and thus most intresting needs.

Should you have any question, please feel free to contact either Ken or me.

Regards,
Niels


On 05/27/2010 03:47 AM, Ken Klingenstein wrote:
> Alex,
>   I'm answering your inquiry about COmanage, and hoping to connect you
> in the process with some folks in Europe who can also engage you as we
> move forward. A few of us have previously noted Lifewatch as an
> important archetype of the community we want to serve - it was good to
> get your note.
>   First of all, I'd like to point you to a BoF at the upcoming Terena
> meeting next week about COmanage and its ilk.
> (http://tnc2010.terena.org/schedule/meetings/index.php?event_id=20). A
> number of the folks who can talk in depth about your questions will be
> there, and I'll mention your interest there. While the BoF is generic in
> its collaboration management platforms, several folks there are involved
> with COmanage type deployments in Europe.
>   As to the status of COmanage, a word of context and then an answer.
> COmanage is as much an architecture as it is an implementation. So it
> takes several forms - as an instance assembled from servers hosting the
> elemental parts of COmanage, as a VM, as a VM in a cloud offering, as a
> national service built from server farms. With that context, COmanage is
> moving forward with increasing velocity as people realize that access
> control to applications is the natural extension of federated identity.
> Most of the work right now is on service instances - the Dutch are doing
> two national services (one for eResearch, which will include collab and
> domain apps, and one - called COIN - for the broad education community
> that will include identity and access control for apps hosted within the
> community); in the US we've heard that the Teragrid is setting up a
> service as well. That suggests integration with Grids - we already have
> a mechanism (called GridShib) that can produce X.509 certs for Grid use
> from a collection of attributes and identity housed in a COmanage type
> store. There has also been a fair bit of work done in federating SSH,
> but the group elements aren't there yet. As for clouds, its pretty
> widely written these days that federated identity is the standard access
> mechanism for them, and we're starting to engage some cloud providers
> (e.g. Google) about bringing in external group information. (The Dutch
> have already built a connector.)
>   In the US, we've done little with social networking (except for a beta
> version of OpenId now in the Shib IdP). However the Dutch have done a
> lot more, integrating OpenSocial into their GUI and tools. We plan on
> following their work.
>   We've recently hired someone to work much more actively on COmanage
> (it was largely volunteer effort in the US previously) and expect a lot
> of progress in the next few months on domesticated applications, GUI's,
> etc. Probably produce a VM in the process, though VM's in a volatile
> development period have a short shelf life.
>   One thing you didn't mention, and that probably matters in a project
> as large as Lifewatch, is automatic provisioning and deprovisioning.
> That's coming in a release soon, and will prove useful. Not many people
> think about deprovisioning...
>   On the COmanage-dev list cc'ed above are a number of sharp technical
> folks (including the Dutch) who can help in our conversations.
>   Thanks for your interest.
>         Ken

-- 
Niels van Dijk
Advanced Services

T: +31 302 305 337 / M: +31 651 347 657
SURFnet - PO Box 19035 - NL-3501 DA Utrecht - The Netherlands -

http://www.surfnet.nl
SURFnet - We make innovation work
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