Phase one of OpenAthens SP evolution

Editor's Notes

• #3: Morning slot Introduction Hi, my name is Phil Leahy and I’m the Service Relationship Manager for all the publishers using OpenAthens products and services. I’m joined by David Orrell, the OpenAthens System Architect and Andy Anderson who doubles as our Training Manager and QA Analyst. For almost 20 years we’ve provided software to publishers who want to enable access to their content in a more secure and extensible way than other methods can offer, such as IP authentication whose death seems permanently in ‘premature announcement’ mode, or more recently peer-to-peer SAML connections which are expensive to deploy and maintain, and yet can each only serve one customer. In the first part of this session David is going to talk about the immediate roadmap for our service provider offer, and then Andy is going to demonstrate the OpenAthens Publisher Dashboard which is the first deliverable of this project.
• #4: Before I hand over to David, I’d like to set this project in the context of the OpenAthens Publisher Manifesto which is in your delegate packs. Hopefully you’ll take this back to your organisation to use as a discussion point with colleagues, and we can send a PDF copy to you if you’d find it more convenient to distribute. The five commitments in the manifesto are displayed here but the second and third items are the ones which the OpenAthens Cloud Service Provider addresses directly. In our experience, the size of a publisher or their technical capabilities has never been a clue to whether that publisher will choose to use open source code or third-party software to deploy support for federated access management. Not everyone wants to be a Shibboleth or SAML expert, and we have some publishers who are using our software after trying the open source route. But that doesn’t mean we take anything for granted - we want to offer the best way of enabling federated access management; to let you integrate our products and services, and then get out of your way so you can get on with supporting your core activities. There will be opportunities to ask questions after each section, so I’ll now hand over to David to talk about OpenAthens Service Provider as a service.
• #21: Outro The OpenAthens Publisher Dashboard is due for release later this month, and we’re optimistic we will be able to release it on Tuesday of next week. If you’re already using the OpenAthens SP dashboard then you won’t need to do anything as the new dashboard will sit on the same URL, and if you’re only using the OpenAthens Federation Manager, a redirect will be in place to log you into the new dashboard. Our Phase I beta finished in October but we still want to hear your feedback. As you have seen, the workflow is a little different and although we’d like to think it’s more intuitive as a result, please let us know your thoughts. We ran two webinars earlier this year to let customers track progress of phase I and we’ll be doing the same in 2017 for Phase II, so if you want to make sure you’re kept aware of those as they’re announced, you can make that known to any member of the OpenAthens team today. We’d also like your feedback on the catering, so if you’d like to make your way to the dining room, we’ll be circulating so you can collar us with questions on anything you’ve heard so far today, even if it’s only about the quality of the sandwiches.