> I'm still not a fan of putting a button saying 'uk access management
> federation' for a number of reasons: [...]
The button was originally "Login using Shibboleth", i.e., it selected
a mechanism/technology rather than an organisation (the UK Access Management
Federation) and therefore didn't suffer from the problems you mention.
Instead, it suffered from being obviously a techie-ness too far and
got bowdlerised to "UK Federation" during internal review.
> JSTOR have sort-of handled this problem for the UK by maintaining the
Athens
> link on the front page - http://www.jstor.org/, thereby maintaining the
> status-quo user experience. This would cope with institutions piloting
Shib
> via the WAYF but still wishing to maintain Athens for most users.
So in effect they have three "mechanism" selectors, expressed as links:
Login using Athens, Login using JSTOR username/password, and
Institutional/Organizational Login. It is the last of these that
appears to be attractive, because it can transparently combine two
mechanisms (Shibboleth and Athens).
When we considered a combined "Athens-enabled Shibboleth WAYF"
accessed from a single login button, there was considerable
internal push-back on the basis that classic Athens users don't
currently have to deal with a WAYF of any kind (since the institution
is encoded in the user name) and forcing them to use one would be
a retrograde step.
The resulting two buttons (Athens/not-Athens) seem comparable with
JSTOR's "Athens" and "Organisational" links. The difference is that
in JSTOR it is possible for an Athens user to overlook or ignore
the Athens link, choose the other one, and still log in correctly
by selecting their Athens institution from the WAYF (at the cost of
a busier WAYF list). Presumably they would hope to be able to drop
the special Athens link at some point. It also allows them to use
the "Institutional/Organizational Log In" terminology without
running aground on the AthensDA issue Sue mentioned the other day.
In the specific EDINA case, if you think that these benefits
outweigh an increased number of entries to wade through in the
WAYF in the Shibboleth case, can you contact me directly and I will
think about revisiting this (gingerly - I still have the scars from
last time around). Things are likely to be less contentious
if the basic Athens case is unaffected, which you seem to be
happy with.
Fiona.
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