Becoming a Critical Infrastructure Component
By the end of 2004, a diverse set of more than 150 educational, government, and corporate organizations were using Internet2's Shibboleth technology to facilitate the sharing of web-based, protected resources between organizations.
In the United States, the Shibboleth project team partnered with the Federal E-Authentication initiative to develop a modified version of the software in preparation for supporting a government-based federation. In addition, the University of Chicago and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) received a National Science Foundation grant to fund the integration of Shibboleth and Grid-based technologies to leverage campus identity management infrastructures, which will enable researchers to easily access inter-institutional Grids.
Internationally, the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee funded eight grants to explore the use of Shibboleth to share course-content and library resources in a secure and scalable fashion.
Shibboleth software development activities continued with release 1.2 in April 2004. Outreach activities to promote awareness and adoption of Shibboleth included workshops and InstallFests which are gatherings to assist in the implementation of Shibboleth software, across the United States and in the United Kingdom.