News for and about the Internet2 community

[Lauren Rotman <>]

InCommon Reaches Major Expansion Milestone
Over 100 Institutions and Two Million Users Participate in First U.S.  
Higher Education Identity Management Federation

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - October 8, 2008 – InCommon(R), the first nationwide  
identity and access management federation for higher education, today  
announced that its community now includes 107 institutional  
participants and over two million end users.

This major milestone highlights the rapid adoption of federation trust  
principals and technologies that improve security and provide a better  
individual experience. Through a federation, organizations can provide  
access to online resources, but individuals only need one "home"  
account. Because federation members agree to certain policies and  
standards-based technologies, this arrangement also preserves a user’s  
privacy.

“As the educational environment has evolved with the advent of  
networked resources and distance learning technologies, our community  
increasingly relies upon complex resource partnerships to achieve its  
missions,” said Clair Goldsmith, Special Assistant for Information  
Technology of the University of Texas System, and chair of the  
governing InCommon steering committee. “The research and education  
community is thrilled with the growth of InCommon and federated  
identity as it allows our campuses both large and small to have  
greater control over our users’ personal information while at the same  
time providing us a more scalable and secure means to share online  
materials and critical applications.”

Today, InCommon provides users at universities and colleges across the  
country with access to a wide variety of online resources from major  
service providers. These services include course management systems,  
library database services, multimedia content, and career center  
systems and tools. Users can also access student discount services and  
computer software downloads from major corporations.

An identity federation is an association of organizations that uses a  
common set of practices and policies to exchange information about  
their users and online resources. College students, faculty and staff,  
for example, can use their university user IDs to gain access to  
resources from any federation resource provider. This greatly  
simplifies transactions among federation members and makes it easy to  
establish working agreements.

"Exponential growth in mobile computing, social networking, and  
scholarly collaboration, both in learning and amongst research teams,  
has created new challenges for universities to develop secure and  
scalable environments that can effectively allow these collaborations  
to happen,” said Lois Brooks, Stanford University’s director of  
academic computing and vice-chair of the InCommon Federation steering  
committee. ”InCommon addresses these challenges by equipping  
universities with the necessary infrastructure to interconnect these  
services and resources in ways that encourage the free flow of  
scholarship.”

In addition, resource providers no longer need to maintain individual  
user accounts, since they can provide protected content to multiple  
campuses and universities using InCommon’s single sign-on system.

“Microsoft’s participation in the InCommon Federation provides us with  
a more seamless and scalable pathway to collaborating with our  
important university partners,” said Jim Pinkelman, director of U.S.  
Academic Relations for Microsoft. “We look forward to working with the  
Federation to engage members of the university community in a new way  
by extending a more user- and privacy-friendly environment that can  
provide access to a wider array of Microsoft’s online resources.”

There will be a track sessions about InCommon and its growing  
community at the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting held in New Orleans, LA  
- October 13-16, 2008.  For more information on the InCommon session,  
visit:
http://events.internet2.edu/2008/fall-mm/sessionDetails.cfm?session=10000150&event=911

For more information on InCommon and a full list of participants,  
visit: http://www.incommon.org

About InCommon(R)
The InCommon Federation provides higher education institutions and  
their sponsored resource partners with unparalleled privacy, security,  
and scalability for accessing protected online resources. InCommon is  
based on the concept of federated administration enabling participants  
to become part of an association of organizations that agree on a set  
of attributes and policies to exchange information about their users  
for access to restricted resources. As a limited liability company,  
InCommon is operated by Internet2 and managed by an independent  
Steering Committee representing the higher education and research  
community. For more information, visit http://www.incommon.org

Media Contact:
Lauren Rotman

202.331.5345


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