Shibboleth Developers

[Scott Cantor <>]

We had a brief con call this morning with EBSCO, from the technical
side, to discuss alpha and beta "fit" with their technical design and
think we're in pretty good shape.

EBSCO uses a front-end IIS "authn" server to interact with the user and
set up a session of their own design to coordinate access to the rest of
their services. This lets them plug in new methods in one place. It also
pushes the RM issues entirely to the back-end, and requires a minimal
amount of information from Shibboleth, mainly a way to map to EBSCO
customer ID 
(affiliation=member@domain
 should suffice) and potentially a
persistent ID for personalization, which we know is something a lot of
people want.

Both the alpha and the beta are/will be capable of doing what they need,
excepting the IIS support. The beta will make it possible to build COM
wrappers around the basic SHIRE and SHAR functions as well as embed them
in an IIS filter, depending on who does the work and what their
requirements are.

The alpha module can be ported from Apache to IIS (with the SHIRE
remaining a Java servlet) by the beginning of September in a minimal
fashion in order to allow a good test of the Shibboleth components by
EBSCO. OSU is a test site for EBSCO, so I'm willing to do this work.

The alpha will provide very little configuration support for IIS, and
the beta will probably do better, but we don't know exactly what will be
provided. In EBSCO's case, the need is minimal because all their policy
is attached to their session, and all they need is a protected front
door.

-- Scott

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