Shibboleth Developers

[Steven Carmody <>]

The Shibboleth team is pleased to announce the availability of the 
first public beta release of the next major version, v1.3, of the 
Internet2  Shibboleth software.  Many new features have been introduced 
and the  providers have been generalized, all described in more detail 
at  https://authdev.it.ohio-state.edu/twiki/bin/view/Shibboleth/ 
ShibOnedotThree .

The initial deployment documentation is available at:

http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/guides/idp/
http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/guides/sp/

At this time, we would strongly encourage sites with some experience and
familiarity with the Shibboleth  software to help the process of
reaching a stable release by downloading, testing, and experimenting
with the software. Problems should be reported via 
http://bugzilla.internet2.edu/ .

NOTES:

1) This is the first beta release of a major new version. Although we 
have tested it, sites should treat this as feature-complete  without 
sufficient load testing, and likely to contain bugs.   Since this is a 
beta release, Shibboleth v1.3b should not be installed over an existing 
Shibboleth  installation, but rather installed into a clean test 
environment.  It is also  not recommended nor supported for production use.

2) With this release, we are moving toward using the SAML vocabulary.
Consequently, some of the old familiar terms (eg SHAR, SHIRE, etc) are
being replaced with newer terms. We have provided a Glossary to help in
this transition. Please feel free to suggest additional entries.

3) Shibboleth v1.3b supports two formats for federation metadata: the 
original proprietary format which is being deprecated, and the newer 
SAML 2.0 format.  To continue to support 1.2.1 deployments, InCommon 
and InQueue will distribute metadata and new provider information in 
both formats; currently, however, since this is a beta release, only 
InQueue is distributing the new format. The new format metadata is 
available at http://wayf.internet2.edu/InQueue/IQ-metadata.xml . Note 
that the information previously contained in the sites and trust files 
has now been merged into a single file. Additionally, many of the new 
features will require use of the new metadata.

4) The InCommon and InQueue application forms have not yet
been enhanced  to allow sites to request that their metadata entry
contain elements that are required for some of the new functionality; 
these  enhancements will be made very soon.

5) At this time, we are only providing installation information for the 
new release. We only expect people to be installing this release into 
clean test environments. However, over the next couple of weeks, we 
expect to provide upgrade guides to help with the summertime transition 
of production Shibboleth sites to the new version.

6) Sites using the SP component are encouraged to use their existing 
configuration files. These should work with the new release.