Athens is still open for business

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to visit Eduserv at their DSP seminar. It was a chance to see what kind of future, the identity management and charitable organisation have planned for their Athens authentication system.

Ever since higher education purse-holder JISC announced they will be backing Open Source platform Shibboleth, the long term future of Athens has been looking a touch shaky. This is despite its near monopoly in serving 97% of UK Higher Education institutes with their information authorisation needs.

With this in mind Eduserv look like they have chosen to swim rather than sink so the main sell of the day pretty much centred on OpenAthens SP and MyAthens. There was a lot of talk about Federated Access Management or rather utilising software in a federated model in order to deal with a variety of standards emerging. Some of these standards comprise of Shibboleth, OpenID, Cardspace from Microsoft as well as existing Athens technology.

Eduserv say the variety of these standards have emerged because the concept of online identity has pointedly changed in the last few years. With the adoption of certain web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis and social networking tools came a reordering of old attitudes. Threats to secure identity from Phishing and ID theft also played a role in how a user relates to and uses their online identity.

When the current agreement with JISC ends, it seems the role for Athens post summer 2008, will have Eduserv banking on smaller organisations and institutes to use OpenAthens. This is because they won’t have the time, finances or necessary expertise to develop Shibboleth; instead they believe they’ll outsource their needs and use OpenAthens. The software will talk to any of these platforms meaning smaller institutions won’t have to be hampered sharing information with the bigger more established Shibboleth adopters. It allows integration and therefore room for both.

Other sensible ideas were mooted, such as a price freeze and that existing users of the platform should expect certain changes to licensing agreements in the longer term.

There were plenty of plans detailing what Eduserv were going to do next, how they saw Identity Management in a wider international context and most importantly, the direction they were going to take Athens in.

Truly addressing why JISC made the decision to back Shibboleth over Athens and the lessons learnt would have boosted delegate confidence even more, although I don’t think Eduserv were feeling so self-assured as to want to tackle that particular elephant in the room.

For more details and access to the various power point presentations visit the Eduserv site here