Blackboard & Shibboleth support- now official

[McAllister, Andrew]

Does the new mechanism support passive (lazy) Shibboleth so that customers can use both Shib and some sort of other fallback authentication mechanism like LDAP or local DB auth?

We've got code that does that now.

Andy McAllister
University of Missouri

From: users-bounces at shibboleth.net [mailto:users-bounces at shibboleth.net] On Behalf Of George Kroner
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 3:31 PM
To: users at shibboleth.net
Cc: EduGarage
Subject: Blackboard & Shibboleth support- now official

Dear all,

At long last I am very happy to inform you that Blackboard Learn 9.1 SP8 (GA'd today) officially supports Shibboleth as a native and fully-supported authentication mechanism across all OS configurations. Thank you to all on (and off) this list who have helped us along the way. Here are some details:

Authentication Framework:
The Authentication Framework improves the authentication integration experience by moving configuration and management of authentication providers to a user interface eliminating the need for command line authentication management. Custom authentication implementations no longer require 'special' maintenance for upgrades because all the Authentication Framework uses Blackboard Building Blocks technology.

Support for CAS and Shibboleth Standards:
The Authentication Framework also provides support for both the CAS (Central Authentication Service) and Shibboleth (the most widely used open-source authentication provider) authentication standards.

Apache 2 Support:
Clients can now front Learn with a separate installation of Apache 2 meeting the needs of security minded clients and also providing the back-end support necessary for Shibboleth authentication on Linux based application servers. Delivery of this feature is via a supported 'cook-book' that details the steps an administrator must take to configure a separately installed Apache 2.  The installer respects the configuration and does not undo these settings.

The exact out-of-the-box setup can be configured to look for REMOTE_USER in either the environment variables or HTTP headers. Users can be associated either via username or institutional identifier (usually a student ID). The logout URL is customizable. A single logout notification URL is also included. Within the next 4 weeks we plan to provide source code for a reference authentication module implementation that can be customized to meet additional or institution-specific needs. Existing legacy authentication modules can be configured to continue to behave exactly as they previously did to provide ample time to transition to the new authentication framework.

More information on Blackboard Learn 9.1 SP8 can be found at this link http://www.blackboard.com/sites/sp8/index.html?utm_source=vanityurl&utm_medium=misc&utm_campaign=sp8lp or on Behind the Blackboard. Please feel free to contact either Blackboard Support or myself if you have any questions.

Thank you,
-George

George Kroner
Technical Lead, Developer Programs
Blackboard, Inc.
www.edugarage.com<http://www.edugarage.com>
Innovate. Integrate. Extend.

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