Hi,
I'm sending this note to share some information about a currently
active conversation with Atlassian about their Confluence wiki
product, and Higher Ed's requirements for how that product interfaces
with campus Identity Services. This conversation may help to jell
some of our ideas (by forcing us to look at a concrete situation),
and may create a model that we could ask other vendors to investigate.
There have been two conference calls with Atlassian Engineering and
Product Management, with a third call scheduled for early November.
Atlassian seems to understand all of the reasons why it makes sense
for them to work with the HE community, and to work with us to ensure
that their product works well as a campus-based service.
During the most recent call, we spent some time reviewing and
exploring some of the HE use cases that we are familiar with, in
order to develop a consensus around the scope of this effort, and
what sorts of activities might be needed. This also included the
traditional "how HE is different segment". Without any prompting,
however, they put forward the "HE is where these use cases first
surface, and then they move to the commercial sector" argument. There
were numerous such instances during the call, convincing me that
they're seriously invested in this effort.
No later than Oct 24th, we're supposed to send them a list of HE use
cases in the "Identity Services" space. We've already started the
process of collecting these, at
https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/InCAtlassian/Inc-AtlassianIdentityUseCases
Between now and then, we need to 1) add to the collection of use
cases, and 2) edit them into a set that the group feels represents
the broader needs (rather than just a single campus). Atlassian will
be bringing some product architects to the next call, with a goal of
identifying specific steps we can take to address the more important
use cases.
I think we now have a communications channel with the vendor -- its
up to us to use it effectively.
In addition, there have been several different groups involved in
this discussion. I'd like to suggest that we move the email portion
of the discussion to [log in to unmask], so that
everyone sees the same threads. If you're interested, you can sign up
for this list by sending email to
[log in to unmask] .
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