Middleware Announcements

[Renee Frost <>]

NSF MIDDLEWARE INITIATIVE RELEASE 6.0 FEATURES FIRST INTRODUCTION TO
PRIVILEGE AND GROUP MANAGEMENT TOOLS FOR IDENTITY MANAGEMENT
INFRASTRUCTURES

Leading-edge development work addresses the administration of identity
information for authorizing access to restricted resources.

December 14, 2004 -- The sixth release of the National Science
Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI) - NMI-R6 - offers several new
components relating to end-user authorization services.

Architected to integrate with academic and research software and
infrastructures such as Grids, the release is available under
open-source licenses to the public at http://www.nsf-middleware.org. New
and updated components in NMI-R6 include standards-based intra- and
inter-institutional authentication and authorization components,
frameworks, and related directory schema. Designed to address specific
challenges in research and education security infrastructures, the
release includes a rich variety of tools that enable researchers to work
more efficiently.

The NMI-R6 release features NMI-EDIT's Signet: An Introduction, a set of
privilege management tools based on the Stanford Authority System in use
since 2001. Signet allows the delegated management of resource access
privilege information that can then be provisioned to applications or
directories. Also included in the release is Grouper, a set of group
management tools that integrates with Signet or can be used
independently.

The GRIDS Center is pleased to announce a new resource to help make
sense of the complicated and ever growing landscape of Grid
technologies. The new Grid Ecosystem provides a mix of high level
discussion on architecture and main subsystems, and drills down into
technical detail and reference pointers for individual software
packages. Also new from the GRIDS team is a pilot community
collaboration server.

In September 2001, the first NMI systems integrator teams began work
along with a number of smaller targeted awards.  After six releases of
software, tools, and practices, NMI is at the leading edge of the
growing "cyberinfrastructure" established to support the next generation
science and engineering.

For the full release, refer to
http://collab.nsf-middleware.org/Lists/NMIR6/announce.aspx.


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Media Contact:
Ann West (906.487.1726 
)
NMI-EDIT

GRIDS Center:  http://www.grids-center.org
NMI-EDIT Consortium:  http://www.nmi-edit.org
OGCE Team:  http://www.collab-ogce.org/nmi/index.jsp