Shibboleth & Respondus / Blackboard Integration

[Mark Valites]

Does anyone else run the Respondus application with a Blackboard setup behind shibboleth?

From what I've gathered, Respondus is a stand-alone application that acts like a simple browser that somehow ties into Blackboard. Since Blackboard is protected by shibboleth at our site, Respondus apparently has custom coded the version of the application running here to follow the redirects & whatnot to our IdP login page, pass through the user's username/passwd & continue on.

We recently migrated nearly all our SPs to SAML2. While Blackboard itself had no issues, we discovered the Respondus application broke. Respondus appears willing to fix the issue by charging us for a new custom patch, but I've gathered they're programmatically just following the expected redirects & whatnot and aren't actually familiar with the new underlying SAML bindings in use. I've also just gathered they broke once previously when we adjusted our IdP's URLs in the metadata we distribute.

For the short term, we've reverted this SP to SAML1.1, but ideally we want to do away with SAML1.1 & then hopefully some of the customizations we made to allow IdPStatelessClustering. Getting the application patched sounds like the route we'll end up with, but I find it a bit frustrating to have this one application around that needs special attention & wonder if anyone else has encountered this or perhaps has suggestions for alternative ways to deal with it.

(SAML bindings / protocols start to get a little beyond my typical level of familiarity with shib, so please correct me if I've mis-spoken.)

-Mark