Advice on the applicability of Shibboleth to our service

[Cantor, Scott]

On 6/11/17, 12:11 PM, "users on behalf of Sean Naderi" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of seannaderi at googlemail.com> wrote:

> I just have a few questions related to our sites specific functionality, and I apologise in advance if my question hints at general
> ignorance towards the service Shibboleth offers.

Well, firstly, it's not a service. It's software installed by a deployer.

> I was wondering if this was at all possible, and if so how that might be accomplished. To be clear, if a user signs on from a
> university X, and X subscribed to academic journals provided by Y, could we then make API calls on behalf of X to Y and show the
> result of this query on our site?

I don't know what the publishers support, but I would be very skeptical that Shibboleth or SAML would be a likely part of such a flow. But I would have to have much more technical detail to even begin to assess where the pieces fit. The details are in the APIs exposed and their security options. Strong doubt would be my default position.

If there were some spec for this being adopted, then the conversation would be more along the lines of what we might have to support to allow it to work. But I have to doubt that the publishers would see this as a good thing to support. They want to connect to their customers, they would probably have no desire for you to be in the middle, and little incentive to facilitate that.

-- Scott