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As a JISC Data Centre, we have had to burn our boats, so to speak, by saying we will withdraw direct Athens access to many of our services on August 1st. We will be relying on our user sites having taken up federated access.

Therefore we are getting a bit twitchy, to put it mildly, from seeing that there are many UK HE & FE institutions and Research Councils which do not yet have an IdP in the federation's metadata (whether their own or outsourced). Relatively few IdPs seem to have been added in the last week or two, and that rate will have to increase dramatically if most eligible organisations are to be covered by 1st August. Only 3 organisations using the Athens-to-Shib gateway are shown with IdPs as separate entities in the metadata (required if they offer user accountability).

It would be helpful to know whether there is a backlog at the federation of requests for IdPs (whether managed by the owners or outsourced) waiting to be processed for adding to the metadata, or whether the bottleneck is with the institutions themselves. Institutions have been reminded several times that they need to take positive action to enable federated access by their users, but perhaps even more publicity is required.

Sean

Mimas