JISC outlines the transition from Athens to Shibboleth

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is throwing its weight behind the UK Access Management Federation and will cease funding Athens authentication, which allows university users access to all the resources their institution has paid for with a single password.

Athens authentication will continue to be available, but JISC will cease funding it after July 2008. Users will need to subscribe individually and pay the Athens fee if they want to continue to go through the Athens gateway.

JISC has set up a transition programme – the Middleware Assisted Take Up (MATU) service – to support institutions’ decision-making about access management choices.

John Robinson, services operations director at JISC, said moving to federated access management would address the problem of multiple user names.

“Staff and students will be able to use one institutional username for all external and internal resources and this will be valid for users as it will allow them access to their email,” he said. “This reduces the burden on library staff, who will be free to concentrate on the selection and management of resources.”

The UK Access Management Federation is operated by UKERNA, whose middleware group manager, Henry Hughes, urged institutions to prepare for the transition early as they would have to take full responsibility for assessing who their members were.

“Look at how many directories you have,” Hughes advised. “Don’t wait until July next year.”

The new access management infrastructure, based on Shibboleth technology, will be extended to schools, other parts of the public sector and even commercial concerns.

Once the infrastructure is in place, higher education institutions could just as easily be content service providers as well as ID providers accessing content, opening up the potential for additional revenue streams.

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