Shibboleth Developers

[Thomas Lenggenhager <>]

> Stephen Carmody said:
> 
>> rephrasing Spencer's question -- what can we do so that users
>> never/rarely see the WAYF?

Pre-selecting the IdP chosen the last time, based on the permanent cookie,
is surely a huge improvement in ease of use.
That is implemented in our PHP-WAYF as well as automatic browser-based
language detection which should increase end-user acceptance in a
multi-lingual environment quite a bit.

You can see it in action in our production federation:
        http://kelut.switch.ch/aai/
(The help files referred to from the WAYF are not yet translated, but
that is under way.)

Going further than pre-selecting the IdP, i.e. just use a permanent
cookie and skip the WAYF is dangerous, in my view.
What shall a user do who has by chance chosen the wrong IdP at the first
visit?
What shall a user do who has two accounts at two IdPs because he has two
roles/jobs and has to be able to switch between them occasionally?

Rod Widdowson wrote:
> ... What the
> Sciencedirect.com WAYF appears to do is to sniff at your IP address and
> make an educated guess about which IdP you might be interested in and
> suggest that first. I wouldn't like to be the one to maintain that though.

They already maintain lists of IPs mapping to customers since years, so
no real burden for them. Not that somebody really would start doing that
now from scratch, I would guess.

Thomas