Blackboard & Shibboleth support- now official

[Cantor, Scott]

On 2/9/12 2:12 PM, "George Kroner" <George.Kroner at blackboard.com> wrote:

>Hi Jose,
> 
>First, I invite anyone on the list to correct me if I¹m mistaken ­
>because we are working towards a solution on this. It is our
>understanding that the WebDAV protocol explicitly requires a username and
>password to work.

WebDAV doesn't know or care, the issue is the clients and their lack of
support for HTTP, and the need to limit flows to things that the limited
clients that do support HTTP and cookies minimally will handle. In SAML
terms, that means either change the client or stick to basic-auth and the
artifact binding, and limiting things to one IdP per URL-space to avoid
discovery.

>Our current thinking is to implement this style of fallback design, but
>we¹d also be open to any other ways to support this, in particular if
>there is a generally-accepted or preferred way of implementing WebDAV
>with Shibboleth.

I wouldn't call artifact preferred, it's just the only way to do it
without changing clients.

> It¹s free for clients who use Content Management and ­ as an example ­
>allows an instructor to click a PPT on their course web site, open it
>straight from the web into MS Office, and when File->Save is clicked the
>course is updated with the new version of
> the PPT file. Perhaps it¹s in a way ³better than WebDAV?² :-)

I had thought WebDAV had definitely headed towards minimal use in the last
few years. The clients were so bad that even SSL wasn't supported half the
time.

-- Scott