By Mikkel Hald, 27/02/18
The new architecture and platform soon to be launched by WAYF will make it far easier than it presently is to connect a WAYF-enabled web service with non-Danish eduGAIN identity providers.
Up until now it has been a rather laborious task for a service provider to make his service available to logins from abroad: he has had to handle identity provider discovery and multiple-IdP metadata entirely on his own — things handled by WAYF's hub when a connected service receives logins from a Danish organisation.
With our new platform and architecture, WAYF will be able to offer its service providers logins from any institution in eduGAIN without any technical changes on their part. In the future, if a provider wants his service to be able to receive logins from an eduGAIN institution, all he will have to do is tick a box in the web interface for WAYF's metadata registry — after which the connection is a reality.
WAYF's new platform thus makes it easier for Danish academic organisations to share restricted web services with foreign institutions and so strengthens WAYF's contribution to facilitating academic collaboration internationally. In like manner, commercial service providers gain far easier access to a global academic market.
Service providers wishing to receive logins from eduGAIN, however, still need to be aware that WAYF is unable to guarantee the availability in eduGAIN of all the user attributes that they are used to receiving in WAYF. Each provider will have to agree with each foreign user organisation what attributes the latter must supply for the former to be able to deliver the service to the organisation.