Middleware Announcements

[Renee Frost <>]

Internet2 and EDUCAUSE Awarded NSF Grant to Develop Collaboration Tools

Friday, 1 Feb 2008

Ann Arbor - 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 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.

See the complete announcement at
http://www.nmi-edit.org/news/sdci.cfm,