Luminis Consulting
July 15, 2007 | 1 Comment
I’ve been serving as the portal administrator at Plymouth State University since 2003. I headed their conversion from Campus Pipeline to Luminis III.2 in 2004. On May 28th we were (most likely) the first institution to deploy Luminis IV in production.
During this time, one of the most satisfying aspects of my job has been talking with other schools. It has often been my pleasure to talk with schools as they first start working with Luminis, or are doing an upgrade, or are just struggling with something new they would like to do with the platform.
Out of one of these conversations I was fortunate enough to establish a more in depth relationship with the University of San Diego. This eventually turned into a consulting engagement which I enjoyed immensely. I was able to help them get their newly hired portal administrator up to speed as well as assist in a number of small modifications and customizations. It also gave me the chance to visit their beautiful campus.
SunGardHE offers a number of options for consulting engagements, but they are very busy. It can often be difficult to get someone, especially for small things, and more challenging if you want them quickly. This is where I can offer my services as a Luminis Consultant.
To highlight my qualifications a bit more, I have presented on Luminis a number of times: LDI Implementation Case Study at PSU at Summit 2005, Implement and Deploy Banner Channels (top five Summit 2006 presentation), LDI Implementation Tips and Tricks, Alumni are Coming and Drag and Drop Channels/Statistics Gathering (Developers Lounge) at Summit 2006, Implement and Deploy Banner Channels and Extending SSO with CAS at Summit 2007, and more!
As always, I’m happy to talk with any school about any Luminis related topic, if however, you are looking for more than a couple conversations, I am available for consulting.
Tags: banner, campus pipeline, cas, channels, consultant, consulting, higher ed, higher education, integration, ldi, luminis, resume, single sign on, sso, summit, sungard, sungardhe, yalecas
CAS Frappr Map
January 16, 2007 | 1 Comment
CAS is by far my favorite Web ISO solution. In the past I have posted about it’s popularity at other institutions.
Along those lines is this cool Frappr map of CAS deployments worldwide.
Tags: authentication, cas, frappr, frappr map, google maps, identity management, maps, sso, web iso, web sso, webiso, websso, yale cas, yalecas
Summit 2007 Presentation Proposals
October 11, 2006 | 1 Comment
It’s that time of year again. I’ve updated my bio and tweaked a few of the proposals I’ve submitted in previous years. I’m submitting fewer this year than past years as many of my responsibilities in the past year have swayed away from Luminis, reducing it’s core status in my workload.
My Title: Portal Administrator and Senior Web Developer
My Bio:
Zach Tirrell is from Plymouth State University in northern New Hampshire. Zach is both portal administrator and senior web developer for the institution. The main areas of his concentration revolve around integrating systems and identity management, Luminis has become a perfect enabler of this. He is often looking to get just a bit more out of Luminis than what is delivered. In the past couple years Zach has become increasingly involved with Summit events. At Summit 2005, Zach presented “LDI Implementation Tips and Tricks”. This presentation was repeated at Summit 2006 as well as a new presentation, “Implement and Deploy Banner Channels”, which was voted in the top 5 by attending reviewers. While at Summit 2006, Zach also co-presented “Alumni Are Coming! Luminis ROI”. Finally, he hosted an informal session in the Luminis Developer’s Lounge where he covered statistics tracking and drag and drop channels within Luminis.
Implement and Deploy Banner Channels
Banner 7 comes with a huge pile of exciting new channels. These channels greatly leverage the relationship between Luminis and Banner, however, implementation is complicated and deployment even more so. Banner channels are fantastic, but they need to be rolled out carefully. Plymouth State University has already run this gauntlet, come hear some of the concerns and pitfalls so you can avoid them yourself.
This is a repeat from last year
Collecting Luminis Statistics
By leveraging the underlying UPortal infrastructure, learn how to take advantage of RDBMSStatsRecorder to generate detailed numbers on who is logging in, logging out, how often, and by role. These numbers are supplemented with other third party statistic tracking utilities. You can then use these numbers to better understand how effective your portal strategy is. Tracking user adoption and growth over time becomes essential to decision making about the portal.
Extending SSO - CAS in Luminis
One of the most common WebISO solutions is the Central Authentication Service (CAS) developed by Yale. In Luminis III.2 CAS became available as an installable module. Learn how to get CAS installed, configured, and where it might fit in your organization. See how Plymouth State University has leveraged the phpCAS libraries to CAS’ify all their internally developed PHP web applications as well as a few third-party ones. What’s best, it only takes a couple lines of code!
This topic is for technical audiences
Tags: banner, banner channels, cas, channel, channels, luminis, portal, portal administrator, RDBMSStatsRecorder, single sign on, sso, summit, sungard, sungardhe, web developer, yalecas
Shibboleth For AuthZ
June 27, 2006 | 1 Comment
I had the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time discussing Shibboleth with Vishal Goenka and Josh Horner while I was at Summit 2006 in Orlando. I wanted to know about the support for Shibboleth that was supposed to be coming in a future version of Luminis and a bit about how it will work. During this discussion it became clear to me that Shibboleth’s core ability for attribute release allows applications to get the information they need to make authorization (authZ) decisions.
Until this point I had only though of Shibb as a solution for inter-organizational web-based single-sign on (Federated SSO or WebISO or WebSSO). I knew I could use Shibboleth internally to serve as my WebSSO, but we already have a hugely successful implementation of CAS in our environment. Additionally I haven’t been able to point at a killer application of the federated WebSSO ability. I knew this driver would be coming, but without immediate demand I was luke warm on Shibboleth.
However, the ability to use Shibboleth internally as a central authority for attribute release and in turn a consistent way of doing centralized AuthZ is a gigantically huge win for us. No longer will every homegrown application need to establish it’s own authorization layer with associated interfaces for maintaining that data. Now I have a serious driver for getting Shibboleth in our environment as soon as possible.
So that’s the lead-in to why Ted Wisniewski, Ken Kochien, and I are attending CAMP Shibboleth: Enabling Campus and Federated Single Sign-On.
Tags: authentication, authorization, camp_062, federated, federation, josh horner, shibb, shibboleth, single sign on, sso, summit, vishal goenka, webiso, websso
Web Initial Sign-on (WebISO)
March 8, 2006 | 6 Comments
Web initial sign-on or WebISO is a term defined by Internet2 as a system
designed to allow users, with standard web browsers, to authenticate to web-based services across many web servers, using a standard, typically username/password-based central authentication service.
They created the definition, but that doesn’t mean I need to like it… I’d like to propose an alternate working definition:
A single point for web based authentication which provides SSO across multiple systems and services.
I think that could be word-smithed further to really get it nice and concise. Please comment any recommendations you have on this.
What excites me about WebISO solutions is their fantastic ability to deep link systems and services. Users can bookmark or share URLs and when someone accesses these systems and services they will be required to provide credentials and then be directed through to what they need. This also sets up applications in a loosly coupled structure ideal for changing individual services without affecting others.
The drawback of this approach (when compared against a monolithic portal application) is how there is generally not a single welcome screen presented to users after authenticating. This loss of a “funnel” approach can cause weaknesses in communication and a perceived loss of control in your user population. Another potential area for weakness is providing a directory of services and ways for users to find what they need initially.
For those not familiar, a couple examples of real life WebISO tools would be: CAS (now JA-SIG as opposed to Yale), Pubcookie, WebAuth (from Duke), Shibboleth, and more.
Tags: "central authentication service", "web initial sign-on", authentication, cas, definition, duke, federation, identity, identity management, single sign on, sso, webauth, webiso, yale, yale cas
Summit 2006 Presentation Proposals
October 3, 2005 | 2 Comments
I finally put together all my material to submit proposals for Summit presentations. I looked back at what we’ve been doing in the portal this year and the following is what I came up with. Overall it’s been a busy year, I was surprised to come up with as many as I did.
My Title: Portal Administrator and Senior Web Developer
My Bio
Zach Tirrell is from Plymouth State University in northern New Hampshire. Zach is both portal administrator and senior web developer for the institution. The main areas of his concentration revolve around integrating systems and identity management, Luminis has become a perfect enabler of this. He is often looking to get just a bit more out of Luminis than what is delivered.
Collecting Stats in Luminis
By leveraging the underlying UPortal infrastructure, learn how to take advantage of RDBMSStatsRecorder to generate detailed numbers on who is logging in, logging out, how often, and by role. You can then use these numbers to better understand how effective your portal strategy is. Tracking user adoption and growth over time becomes essential to decision making about the portal.
This presentation is for technical audiences.
YaleCAS in Luminis
One of the most common WebISO solutions is the Central Authentication Service developed by Yale (YaleCAS). In Luminis III.2 CAS became available as an installable module. Learn how to get YaleCAS installed, configured, and where it might fit in your organization. See how Plymouth State University has leveraged the phpCAS libraries to CAS’ify all their internally developed PHP web applications as well as a few third-party ones. What’s best, it only takes a couple lines of code!
This presentation is for technical audiences.
Luminis and Identity Management
While deploying Luminis, or maybe immediately after, lots of questions arise related to identity management. Are you using a central authentication point like LDAP or Active Directory? How do technologies like CPIP or YaleCAS fit into your authentication scheme? What applications should and can use SSO? Are you centrally managing authorization? Is shibboleth something you should be thinking about? How is your password policy? What’s you level of assurance on accounts you have assigned? All these questions and more will be discussed. Come prepared for lots of crowd participation.
LDI Implementation Tips and Tricks
Plymouth State University is starting to reap the rewards of its integrated campus portal strategy. PSU started its Banner migration in 2001, deployed Campus Platform 3 with its legacy SIS in 2002, publicly deployed Banner in 2003, and in 2004 with the migration to Luminis and implementation of LDI for eLearning, has finally reached “critical mass.” Luminis provides the infrastructure and LDI provides the glue that connects Banner, WebCT, the library, and other services. The presentation details Plymouth State University’s implementation and discusses the problems and solutions we faced along the way, with an emphasis on LDI and Luminis. Plymouth State has used this technology to realize the benefits of a unified digital campus.
This is a repeat from last year
Implement and Deploy Banner Channels
Banner 7 comes with a huge pile of exciting new channels. These channels greatly leverage the relationship between Luminis and Banner, however, implementation is complicated and deployment even more so. Banner channels are fantastic, but they need to be rolled out carefully. Plymouth State University has already run this gauntlet, come hear some of the concerns and pitfalls so you can avoid them yourself.
Tags: active directory, banner, campus portal, cas, channel, channels, identity management, integrate, integrated, integration, ldap, luminis, php, plymouth state university, portal, sct, sso, summit, sungard, sungardsct, tirrell, webiso, yalecas, Zach Tirrell, Zachary Tirrell
Mishmash of Acronyms
August 29, 2005 | 5 Comments
While reading technical documentation today Jon and I busted a gut when we read:
“You can set the LDAP authentication process to use Single Socket Layer (SSL).”
I assume this is some tech writers confusion between Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Single Sign-On (SSO).
Tags: definition, secure socket layer, single sign on, single socket layer, SSL, sso