For 2011, Jack Suess will become Chair of the InCommon Steering committee. InCommon is an organization of universities, now totaling 186, that are working with vendors, governments, and amongst ourselves to provide trust-based services such as authentication and secure communication. The primary service is one based on creating a higher education federation that can leverage institutional login credentials to provide you access to services off campus. In total there are approximately 250 organizations including Microsoft, NIH, NSF, and a host of others leveraging the work of InCommon.
The goal of these InCommon is provide universities with a common approach for solving the problem of integrating outside vendors and services with the benefits being improved service and reduced cost. During 2011, InCommon will continue adding new members and expanding into new trust services, such as a new higher-education focused certificate service.
For UMBC, having a member of our community named Chair is recognition for the work that the campus has done with building our Identity Management system, which we call the Retriever Community System (RCS), and the integration of services we have done inside myUMBC.
The work with InCommon has been done by many in DoIT. Over the past decade former staff such as Rob Banz ( now at Google) and present staff Jason Griego, Paul Riddle, Todd Haddaway, Joe Kirby and Mike Carlin have demonstrated great ability to work with vendors to expand our single-signon environment.
This coming year UMBC will have a number of initiatives that rely on InCommon, these include:
* a partnership with the Office of Institutional Advancement and expand the RCS expand to include Alumni and friends of UMBC;
* utilizing UMBC credentials to access NSF and NIH for research administration;
* utilizing InCommon for better access to electronic library databases;
* launching a new authentication service using personal certificates; and
* becoming part of a global wireless service called eduroam.
If you have questions on the Retriever Community System or want to find out more about InCommon please email jack@umbc.edu.
You can also find out more about personal technology by Jack Suess on the UMBC TechBits blog.