Phil,
>The problems you refer to are all associated with non-gateway compliant
>services, so these do not diminish the usefulness of the gateway. With
>90% of Athens resources being gateway-compliant, we are working with the
>suppliers of the remaining services to get them to use a feature we
>released over two years ago! :o)
You misunderstand me! The problem (that we see as show-stopping to rolling out live use of the Gateway to our users, who are only poor, non-technical social scientists ;->) is with using a *combination* of Gateway-compliant resources *and* the 10% that you say are not yet Gateway-compliant.
I appreciate your frustration with getting suppliers to adopt the 'new' (2-year-old) features of Athens, so that they can work via the Gateway. Where those resources are licensed by LSE we are very willing to throw our weight, such as it is, behind that approach to them.
It would be useful if JISC (as primary client of the Athens service for UK F&HE) could give those vendors clear information, soon, about the transition to a Shibboleth-based infrastructure. Then they could make an informed choice about either implementing the Athens Gateway-compliant software, or a direct Shibboleth SP.
In the latter case, we would also encourage our non-UK friends to put similar pressure on vendors. This shouldn't cause a problem for UK 'late adopters' of Shibboleth, because (I presume) they would be able to use the Athens-to-Shib element of the Gateway to continue providing Athens-mediated access, for as long as they wished, or as long as that service was available.
John
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