Thursday 4 March was an all-day start-up meeting for the JISC Access and Identity Management (AIM) Programme at Devonport House in Greenwich.  Chris Brown ran us through how projects are expected to interact with the programme as a whole, project reporting and so on.  Later in the day, Andy McGregor from JISC introduced the new JISCPM project management forum, complete with its own #jiscpm twitter hashtag.

The rest of the day was mainly a short presentation from each project in the programme. These ran in alphabetical order, so WSTIERIA was up last (didn’t think of that one when choosing the acronym, maybe A1 Web Service Plumbers would have been better…)

The GRAND project at Newcastle also has an N-tier element, but based on Kerberos so targeted at back-end tiers within a single administrative domain.  The example use cases mentioned were federated login to something like a student portal, with the portal getting a Kerberos ticket allowing it to invoke back-end services such as an enterprise e-mail system (to show the student that they have pending mail), or a file system.

The most unexpected potential commonality was with the Student-Managed Access to online Resources (SMART) project, also at Newcastle. Maciej Machulak described the work they are doing as contributors to the new User-Managed Access (UMA) standard within the Kantara initiative.  I mentioned I had taken a look at OAuth WRAP because of its conceptual similarities to the web service access-control façade idea from the previous JISC/EDINA SEE-GEO project on which WSTIERIA is based.  Maciej says that UMA has some similar features.  Both he and Aad van Morsel from SMART suggested a visit to Newcastle, which sounds well worth while.