Extending the Reach Program
To prototype scaling the outreach efforts, NMI-EDIT developed a program for higher-education related communities that might also be interested in the benefits that identity management could provide. State higher-education systems and state education networks were chosen as logical audiences, since they both had established working relationships, existing member education and communication channels, and, in many cases, similar drivers among the multiple institutions.
The Extending the Reach (ETR) Call for Proposal was released in May of 2004 with overall vision of exploring possible models to scale the outreach work and inform the NMI-EDIT development efforts through collaboration with this wider, more diverse group of institutions. The main goals for the ETR Program were
- Enabling deployments of core middleware that conform to higher-ed practices.
- Developing and piloting diverse business models, services, and products for middleware training, consulting, and deployment.
- Disseminating information about the project to other organizations and communities to spur other similar activities.
- Informing NMI-EDIT outreach and technology-related products
Projects
The University of Alaska, University of Texas, California State University, and the Great Plains Network Consortium were chosen as partners to explore this scaling opportunity.
Though the goals of the four participant consortia shared many commonalities, the individual projects addressed very different challenges. Results of the ETR Program can be further explored by viewing the individual case studies submitted by each of the participant institutions:
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University of Alaska focused on the development and printing of phone books based on a common electronic directory service in order to drive the acceptance of it across their system. For a detailed project report, refer to Identity Management and Enterprise Directories in a University System.
- University of Texas pursued four projects associated with 1) building a Shibboleth® and related IdM infrastructures at member campuses, 2) deploying Shibboleth-enabled services with partners, 3) piloting the sourcing of IdM services for small campuses, and 4) building the UT Federation. For a detailed project report, refer to "Extending the Reach" Case Studies.
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California State University leveraged their ETR mini-grant to pilot a project where one campus hosted the IdM back-end technical systems (person registry, enterprise directory, and authentication) for another. For a detail project report, refer to The Identity Management Collaborative: Remote Middleware Support.
- Great Plains Network Consortium, a loosely-affiliated group of campuses spread across seven states in the central part of the country, determined that sharing research resources was a priority and deployed Shibboleth to facilitate access to a bioinformatics application. In addition they extended the Subversion code revision system to support Shibboleth for access control. For detail project reports, refer to Building the Regional Middleware Infrastructure and Integrating Shibboleth, Grid and Bioinformatics.
For more background information on the ETR program, review the final report. If your institution is interested in sharing middleware related resources with other campuses and/or participating in other NMI-EDIT outreach activities, send mail to participation@nmi-edit.org.
