SSO comparison request from executive management

[Cantor, Scott]

> My point was more that my experience of Shib "marketing" (such as it is) is
> that it is more focused on the higher ed community directly and less on
> vendors.

"Such as it is" would be the more accurate sentiment. We just don't have the bandwidth or the right people to do marketing to anybody. To the extent that we marketed to higher ed, it was people behind the project at I2, not anybody that's left on the project.

Me? I wrote code. Use it, don't use it, I have stuff to do.

> I was suggesting that there might be value to InCommon in looking at ways to
> encourage the use of the Shib (or other well-supported) SP products by
> vendors.

I have been assuming that if there's to be any point to all this profile work we've been doing at InCommon, it's going to have to include that somehow by somebody. But it never has before, true enough.

> The discussions I've seen in TIER (and I know I'm crossing mailing list
> scopes here) about potentially containerizing a Shib SP, for example, could
> make the Shib SP much more attractive not just to campuses but also to
> vendors. My sense is that our PoV is generally less about vendor adoption,
> and that "selling" Shib to vendors might need to be done differently than it
> would be to campuses.

I think that's fair, save that I'm entirely unclear how it will actually be done (with respect to the SP I mean). The SP by its design is meant to be installed into an environment managed by an application owner. It's not a gateway, and that was very deliberate. Gateways are much easier to package, and dropping in proprietary or non-federated protocols is then the extra/final step that has to touch the application.

-- Scott