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COmanage: Collaborative Organization Management
The COmanage Project is an effort by the Internet2 Middleware Initiative to develop a set of capabilities that allow collaborative organizations (COs) to meet their objectives using key collaboration tools in a secure and effective framework. By leveraging external (federated) identity management services, authentication and authorization of group members are handled in a single, efficient process that feeds from each member's home organization into the various applications (such as wikis, calendaring, conferencing, and domain applications) that are available to CO participants.
What is COmanage?
Imagine researchers and administrators working together on a groundbreaking research effort while being based at numerous different universities and research institutes. To facilitate their teamwork, these collaborators need to share documents, set up institution-independent mailing lists, and use a wiki to capture their work, as well as utilize other collaboration tools to support their work.
They also need to utilize an authentication infrastructure not tied to any of their home institutions, so individuals can log in to a neutral location and work together. But that starts to go well outside the larger need to move ahead with their research. Their focus needs to be on the collaboration, not the technology.
Here is where COmanage comes in. COmanage allows collaborative groups to streamline and manage the identity-oriented requirements of common collaboration tools. With COmanage, the identity management components -- the group membership that ties together mailing lists, the authentication, and so on -- are all handled behind the scenes. This means that collaborators can focus on what they do best -- advancing scholarship and research in their field of expertise.
Bedrock
Information about the National Science Foundation - Software Development for CyberInfrastructure (NSF-SDCI) Bedrock award which is providing major funding this project is available on the Bedrock website.
- Internet2 Press Release: Internet2 Middleware Initiative Awarded NSF Grant to Enhance Science and Research Collaboration (pdf)
- NSF Award Announcement
The Architecture
- The development of COmanage Gears, an Identity Management System (IdMS) designed for collaborative organizations
- Domestication of applications for use in a collaborative environment
(see Roadmap below for definition of "domestication") - The development of best practices for integrating and leveraging federated identity in a collaborative environment
- The development of a platform that provides collaborative services to smaller organizations
The COmanage Project is committed to open standards, and developing and utilizing open source software, facilitating integration, customization, and future development. The COmanage Project is working with the global community to leverage existing work and help direct new work to ensure interoperability across the domain.
The Roadmap, 2012-2013- Implement COmanage with appropriate User Interface (UI) for the COs
- Develop OpenSocial toolkit for other COs and tools to present COmanage
- Create a flexible enrollment workflow to bring individuals in to COmanage
- Demonstrate an active, production instance of COmanage within a participating CO
- Create a business model for a service instance, and determine levels of support with/for the participating CO
- Hold an international meeting with CO architects and developers to discuss specific and unique IAM needs in the research collaboration enviroment
- General release of COmanage (v1.0)
- Complete requirements gathering from participating collaborative organizations (COs)
- Develop a Registry of Domesticated Applications (i.e., applications that work well with enterprise infrastructure, typically by externalizing group management, authentication, and/or authorization)
- Determine levels of support with/for the participating COs
- Participate in extensive outreach with other international collaborative platform efforts (e.g SURFnet Collaboration Infrastructure project - COIN)
- Develop web services presentation of COmanage services for use by other applications, gateways, portals, etc.
NOTE WELL: All Internet2 Activities are governed by the Internet2 Intellectual Property Framework.
Development of this software was supported with funding from Internet2, Stanford University, and the National Science Foundation (Grant No. OCI-0721896, OCI-0330626, OCI-1032468). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
