News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren Rotman" <>]

Internet2 and EDUCAUSE Awarded NSF Grant to Develop Collaboration Tools

Ann Arbor, MICH - February 6, 2008 - The EDIT Consortium of Internet2 and
EDUCAUSE has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for its
ongoing work in the development of important middleware technologies. The
grant will support further work in identity and access management and
infrastructure that organizations use to verify and manage online user
identity and access. 

Research and education collaboration teams share many online tools and
resources to do their work, including calendars, email list services, wikis
and document sharing software. One of the primary goals of the EDIT
Consortium is to help such groups improve their productivity through
scalable tools that enable appropriate access to protected online resources.

For instance, when a project member is added or removed from a particular
team or class, each service or tool must be updated (by hand in many cases)
to reflect the person's access rights to the group's or class's shared
resources. Because of this, managing authentication and authorization for
all of a project's resources has over time become an administrative and
security burden. Through its award from NSF's Software Development for
Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) program -- a continuation of the NSF Middleware
Initiative (NMI) -- the EDIT team will work to extend and integrate its
authentication and authorization tools to greatly enhance and streamline the
management of collaborative online environments.

"Collaborators want tools such as shared calendaring, videoconferencing, and
wikis that integrate their teaching and research lives and their
institutional and inter-institutional worlds," said Ken Klingenstein,
Internet2 senior director of middleware and security and principal
investigator for the grant. "Leveraging our work in authentication and
authorization, we can provide a way for distributed users to manage many of
the identity-oriented requirements of common collaboration tools." 

Building on the consortium's existing work -- including Shibboleth Single
Sign-on and Federating Software, Grouper Groups Management Toolkit and
Signet Privilege Management System -- EDIT is developing a collaboration
approach that enables IT administrators, faculty, and other group leaders
the ability to make group membership and resource privilege changes using
one consolidated tool, rather than updating each individual application.
This improves security and reduces the time needed to manage project groups,
both on and off campus.

The consortium and development lead, Internet2, will distribute a majority
of the funding 
to campuses, supporting part-time middleware experts to serve as technical
leaders and developers. EDUCAUSE will guide the outreach activities,
leveraging existing momentum developed over the last seven years of outreach
on identity and access management.

For more information:
EDIT Consortium: www.nmi-edit.org
Internet2: www.internet2.edu
EDUCAUSE: www.educause.edu