Shibboleth Developers

["RL 'Bob' Morgan" <>]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Jim Fox wrote:

> > disagree with you about where the right ending place is. I suspect it's
> > somewhere central to the federation of sites that is associated with that
> > scarab.
>
> Not a chance. It is, after all, the very essence of shib that no one 
> knows it's there. Students at UW, to give an example, wouldn't know 
> InCommon or any other federation from the man in the moon.  They log in 
> to UW and they expect to log out from UW. Even when they click on a 
> logout button on some remote application they expect it to be a UW site 
> that finally says, "You're logged out."

There are lots of ways to organize a "federation of sites" as Scott calls 
it.  A set of financial services entities, for example, might be organized 
around a site (or could be more than one) that acts as an SP but provides 
a starting point for users to access lots of associated services, with SSO 
and potentially several IdPs; my credit card company's site is kind of 
like that already.  This is a natural extension of the portal worldview, 
which is very common.  Universities (or maybe it's just us university 
middleware types) tend to be IdP-centric for some reason, but other 
industries seem to be less so, from what I've seen.

 - RL "Bob"