Shibboleth Developers

[Thomas Lenggenhager <>]

Dear all

here is the feedback from SWITCH for the proposed Shibboleth 2.0 roadmap.

In short, there are two items that are very dear to us:

1. Release of Shibboleth 2.0
----------------------------
We strongly prefer an early release of Shib 2.0, possibly deferring some
"less desired" features into 2.1.

Suggestion: The developer team could indicate, which items demanding
considerable work are on the critical path and could delay the release
of Shib 2.0. The community might then comment whether they are urgently
needed in 2.0 or if they could wait for 2.1.

2. Support for delegation
-------------------------
We thought that this would be a Shib 2.0 item, but it looks like it is
definitely deferred to 2.1.
However, in the roadmap it is neither mentioned for 2.1 nor under
'unassigned features'.
For our work in the grid environment (EGEE-2), we definitely like/need
to have support for delegation.
Our desired time frame is
 - delegation specification in Q3 2006
 - beta implementation in Q4 2006


Further comments on the road map:

1) The most useful new feature for us is  support for 'some basic
authNContext' as we will introduce strong authentication in our
federation in Q3/Q4.
Could you please elaborate a bit what where 'some basic authNContext' is
limited in contrast to 'authNContext'?

2) Supporting compatibility with 1.2 SPs is great in terms of smoother
migration of our operational federation from SAML 1.1 to SAML 2.0.
Otherwise 2.0 could only be deployed at IdPs when all 1.2 SPs were
eradicated.

3) Adding single log-out for 2.0 has in our view the advantage of an
earlier broad deployment of single log-out capable systems. In turn,
this will allow an earlier federation wide enabling of that feature.

4) Improved documentation as suggested is well appreciated. The support
on the mailing list is great, but having a more complete reference would
be helpful too.

5) It was once mentioned that the Java SP might be released before the
C++ SP. Is that still under consideration?

Looking forward to a great Shib 2!

Regards,
Thomas

-- 
Thomas Lenggenhager           http://www.switch.ch/
SWITCH       The Swiss Education & Research Network
Zurich, Switzerland            Tel: +41 44 268 1541