The end of summer is always a busy time of year for campuses preparing for the new academic year. So this seems like a good time for an update on the NET+ Splunk program since the last update in April 2018 and as a follow-on to the overall NET+ program updates.

As a follow-on for the overall NET+ program updates, we want to provide an update on the  NET+ Duo program as there are a few key updates since the last update in April 2018. 

For the past year, a group of 10 campuses have worked together to adopt one or more components of the TIER software — an identity and access management suite consisting of Shibboleth, Grouper, COmanage, midPoint, and other components. The philosophy behind this Campus Success Program (CSP) is that collaborating would make things easier for the individual campuses and will help accelerate software adoption.

The higher education trust and identity community has produced a wealth of helpful documents over the past two decades, including charters, standards, reports, recommendations, and guidelines. As websites and wikis evolved, frankly, sometimes those documents became challenging to locate and revisions confusing to track. So a few years ago we got serious about establishing a process and framework to ensure that key documents would be preserved and maintained in a systematic fashion. 

Internet2 is monitoring Hurricane Florence and will continue to monitor the situation closely to determine what impacts may arise to our campus members and regional network partners in the storm path. We will continue to update this page as information changes or becomes available.

As a follow-on to last week’s NET+ cloud services summer update on programmatic elements, this week, we are pleased to provide an update on various community events from service providers in the NET+ cloud services portfolio and other opportunities to engage with the team!

InCommon participants continue to make progress in meeting Baseline Expectations for Trust in Federation. One key indicator comes from the monthly Metadata Health Checks that InCommon operations has been providing since February 2018.

Internet2’s Community Anchor Program (CAP) is happy to announce the launch of a new monthly feature called the State and Regional Network Spotlight. 

The Trust and Identity track at this year's TechEx (2018 Technology Exchange) features four in-depth sessions; each twice as long (110 minutes) as a normal track session. The community planning committee felt that there are a number of topics that deserve a deeper dive than a 50-minute session offers.

The Internet2 NET+ program is a collaborative effort between multiple Internet2 member institutions and service providers, facilitated by Internet2 staff, working together to fashion and maintain cloud service offerings that work uniquely well for research and education consumption and use. 

The implementation of a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute circuit at Georgia Tech has been an insightful endeavor.

Internet2 has completed the transition of the wiki to the new domain, spaces.at.internet2.edu, which is the first entree on the new Collaboration Platform menu.

The National Park Service, U.S Presidential Libraries and Museums, the Internet2 community, and cultural and historic organizations nationwide are proud to offer the annual Presidential Primary Sources Project, a series of free, standards aligned, 45 minute interactive videoconferencing programs aimed at students in grades 6-12.

As a part of Internet2’s ongoing community effort to promote awareness and provide opportunities to gain experience with new technology and tools, the third Network Automation Workshop will be presented during the Internet2 Technology Exchange on October 15, 2018. 
 

On July 17, the Shibboleth Consortium released a major new update to its Shibboleth Service Provider (SP) software, version 3.0. As of the writing of this blog, version 3.0.2 is the latest supported release of this software. 

The 2018 Technology Exchange (TechEx) features sessions for those interested in learning about identity and access management, the InCommon Federation and federated identity, and adopting open-source IAM components.

As of July 20, 2018, InCommon had 984 participants.  Learn about the new participants who have been added since the last newsletter in June 2018.

Federations like InCommon are there to help make collaboration happen for researchers, scholars, students, and staff. A very substantial analysis of how that's going has just been published.