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EDINA technical support for the UK federation

UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research website.

In a project funded by the JISC Core Middleware: Technology Development Programme, from 1 April 2004 to 31 March 2007, EDINA, as the Shibboleth Development and Support Service (SDSS) led by Sandy Shaw, investigated and put in place the technical components necessary to sustain an initial Shibboleth infrastructure, providing an environment that assisted other projects supported by the Core Middleware programme. The EDINA project team designed and from early 2005 ran a development federation.

Following the success of this pilot work, the “UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research” (normally referred to as the “UK federation”) opened for business on 30 November 2006.

Its design and operation was closely modelled on that of the development federation. It was decided that JANET(UK)—then called UKERNA—should manage the UK federation, with EDINA providing support in all technical aspects. The original project funding was extended by the JISC in order to fund this technical support work.

The federation added new members at a rate of over 2.5 per week to the end of 2007, by which time it had 150 members; it now has more than 800 members and is the largest in the world.

EDINA and JISC Collections now operate the UK Access Management Federation in partnership. The user base envisaged for the UK federation is at least an order of magnitude greater than that of the next biggest national deployment of Shibboleth in an educational federation. The helpdesk for the UK federation is based at EDINA and provides support for Shibboleth SP and IdP installation and configuration and maintains the UK federation metadata.

The JISC funded SDSS Expert Group, based at EDINA, with wide scope and remit, continues to:

  • provide advice and guidance to the JISC on identity and access management
  • provide expert advice and guidance to the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research
  • participate as core members in the development of Shibboleth software

For the UK Access Management Federation, it has provided the federation’s technical architect (Ian Young) who has overseen the successful development of a stable and robust federation; it has also provided in-depth technical advice and guidance to the community.