I travelled to Birmingham on Wednesday for an event introducing Eduserv’s new single-sign on product, OpenAthens LA 2.0.
The slides for the event:
The product was presented as a sequel to AthensDA (Devolved Authentication), launched in 2002, well used by Universities/ FE Colleges in the UK.
Some important points that were brought up at the conference:
- Currently only 40% of electronic resource providers in the UK support Shibboleth, causing a great deal of complication for Shibboleth as a single-sign on solution.
- Statistics are almost non-existent in Shibboleth. Librarians/ IT staff currently have to make sense of the endless log data in order to work out how often their resources are accessed.
- AthensDA is still used by Universities alongside Shibbleth in order to connect to resources that Athens authenticated only. As a result IT departments are required to implement an interoperability between the two technologies.
Realistically the disadvantages of Shibboleth should be short term. As the product is now widely used as well as open source, there will likely be developments to enable librarians to manipulate data easily. In the long term it is highly likely that the amount of service providers will increase rapidly due to support and pressure from the JISC.
OpenAthens LA 2.0 really interested me as a product. The message throughout was fairly consistent: if you have an LDAP server / Windows environment, the product will run without issue. It requires two parts of the system to be hosted internally, including the main set-up of the system as well as the admin side hosted on a web server so that changes can be made remotely. The admin system did seem fairly complicated to use and therefore may require IT to become much more involved in the early stages of use. Eduserv however were confident that this system will be much more simpler when available for release.
The statistics side is a real treat though, as it allows Librarians to use the comprehensive process they are already used to with classic Athens. The system also caters for Libraries who need to set-up quick accounts so that walk-in users can access electronic resources. With Shibboleth this would involve setting up a temporary entry in the Active Directory, clearly not a solution for many institutions!
Overall I think we should consider this as a viable alternative. Over the coming years many of our electronic providers may choose to provide Shibboleth only authentication, in which case moving over to this framework would be much more important. But if many institutions begin to choose this product over Shibboleth in the short term, why would service providers seek to spend money on Shibboleth?
I would welcome any comments on this as I am an authentication noob, starting out a career in digital resource Librarianship.
Tags: Athens, Authentication, shibboleth
For point 2 while shibboleth does not provide statistics about access out of the box you can relatively easily make them yourself for the log files, jim fox in washington has even made a tool to do so see:
http://staff.washington.edu/fox/stats/last7.shtml
There are multiple ways you can cater to temporary users, an example being to use Yale’s CAS as the login system and use it’s drop through authentication to try login against the Active Directory first then try against your hand rolled database of temporary users.
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