Case studies 

Project

• UNISA - University of Nottingham

  Athens - Shibboleth Integration at the University of Nottingham

  The University of Nottingham is one of the UK’s leading, internationally recognised higher education institutions with over 30,000 under and postgradute students. It comprises 6 physical campuses, 4 in the UK and two overseas branches; one in Malysia and another recently established in China.

• The JISC funded Early Adopters initiative, supported by Eduserv, provided the incentive for the University to replace their existing classic Athens access management infrastructure and move towards a devolved system by implementing AthensIM to utilise the Shibboleth- to-Athens gateway.

• The project, entitled “University of Nottingham Implementation of Shibboleth for Athens (UNISA)”, commenced in February 2005 and the initial milestone of offering the service to a limited number of students (7000 first year undergraduates) by September 2005 was achieved.

• A major reason for restricting the project to a partial roll out was due to the unavailability of some Athens resources via the Athens-to-Shibboleth gateway at the time of going live. Eduservs' Middleware Assisted Take-Up (MATU) service played an active role in liaising with Eduserv’s Athens service to assist with this transition.

• According to Andrew Barker, Systems Development Office at the University, Eduserv was also instrumental in assisting his project team with reaching the very tight deadlines set for the project and much of the implementation’s success relied heavily on the support service provided:

  "The help we received was excellent. We found the quick response in solving complex issues with the minimum amount of fuss provided by Eduserv was extremely useful in getting the system up and running”.

• On the technical side, Linux boxes with the Apache, Tomcat and Mod_jk installed were deployed, and configured to run Eduserv’s Shibboleth 1.2 compliant identity management software, Athens IM. Although some teething problems were experienced by users following the initial set up, such as switching between the classic and shibbolized Athens login, the overall integration of AthensIM and the generation of permission sets for user groups, ran smoothly.

  The continued use of the system has also been very encouraging as evidenced by student feedback and the noticeable lack of user complaints and queries about the new system.

Further details are available from the project website