 |
 |
Is there anyone on the list who has enough knowledge to answer a rather fundamental question, that could decide whether using the federation is worth the hassle? The basic problem is personalisation of resources and the attributes used to do so. eduPersonTargetedId is used through the shibb-athens gateway but it's specced to be different for each SP. RefWorks through the gateway and RefWorks through the fed are two separate SPs with different entityId (I presume), so the spec says they cannot share the value of ePTID, except in exceptional circumstances. I'd argue the exceptional circumstance of losing all your references from RefWiorks because you change the middleware is cause enough to keep ePTID constant across these two SPs. The bottom line is, if someone gets kicked off athens for not paying, all their users lose all their settings in RefWorks because the middleware has changed. The settings are still there, they just can't get access to them due to a combination of middleware specs and implementation changes. It's not possible for an admin to login to RefWorks and transfer settings between "accounts". So you end up with multiple sets of settings depending on how you accessed the resource. To me, that sounds a good enough reason not to switch to the federation, unless someone can allay these fears. Anyone fancy it? We were hoping to answer these Qs between now and 2011 but that's not an option any more. It feels like we're being asked to evacuate Athens, leave all our possessions behind and build a new life in Federation City. Alistair -------------- mov eax,1 mov ebx,0 int 80h