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SWITCHaai: 1’000 services registered

Last week, the number of services registered in the SWITCHaai federation crossed the 1’000 line for the first time.

When the Università della Svizzera italiana, Damiano Bianchi (Servizio informatico TI-EDU) registered the ‘USI Library service’ (the 21st service of USI), this new service became the 1’000th SP available in the SWITCHaai federation.

It’s the first time in the history of SWITCHaai that we have reached this number of registered SPs. Due to old services getting deleted and new ones registered, the actual number of services slightly fluctuates. However, in general it has been steadily increasing since the production SWITCHaai service was launched 12 years ago in autumn 2005 (see the graph in the lower right corner in the growth picture below).

201706 SWITCHaai Status

The steady growth of the SWITCHaai Federation

The SWITCHaai federation serves the higher education community in Switzerland and Liechtenstein: More than 99% of all students, staff members and researchers at universities, universities of applied sciences and teacher education universities have a SWITCHaai-enabled user account. With their account, they can access a wide variety of services. Users as well as service administrators enjoy the benefit of no service specific user accounts required!

In addition, more than 100’000 further users from about 20 university related institutions have user accounts that provide them also access via SWITCHaai.

SWITCH and the SWITCHaai federation participate in the development and use of eduGAIN, the GÉANT interfederation service that interconnects more than 40 federations world-wide.


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Consultation on draft of federal E-ID law

At its meeting on 22 February 2017, the Swiss Federal Council opened a consultation on legislation on electronic identification (E-ID law, see announcements: DE, FR, IT). The consultation ended 29 May 2017.

SWITCH participated in this consultation and confirms the importance of a well-functioning and generally accepted E-ID. The identity service SWITCH edu-ID/SWITCHaai could potentially benefit from such an E-ID legislation: either to start offering an E-ID function itself, or by consuming E-ID services. Such use cases – from SWITCH and from other parties – may become important drivers for the spread of E-ID beyond pure e-government applications and for the emergence of an general-purpose E-ID ecosystem.

After evaluating the proposed delivery model in the draft E-ID-law, SWITCH proposes its revision. To ensure swift implementation and to reduce risks and complexity, SWITCH urges that the proposed market model be abandoned in favour of an implementation by the Swiss Confederation itself or by mandating it to a third party.

If the market model is to be pursued nevertheless, SWITCH proposes the use of a multi-stakeholder expert group to resolve the many open questions arising from the draft. If this group can not achieve its objectives, the market model is to be abandoned once and for all in favour of the proposed government-driven implementation model for an E-ID.

You are invited to read the full answer of SWITCH to the consultation (in German): 20170529 Vernehmlassungsantwort SWITCH E-ID-Gesetzesentwurf.

 


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Bye-bye Cloud ID – Welcome SWITCH edu-ID

About 27,000 people have got mailing from the SWITCH edu-ID team April 19:
Instead of their former Cloud ID account, SWITCH edu-ID would be used as from 1st May  2017 in order to access the services SWITCHdrive and SWITCHengines.

But how should the vast majority of those users, who did not already have a SWITCH edu-ID account, come to such an identity?

Changeover without effort for 98% of users

The usual way to generate a SWITCH edu-ID account is self-registration – this in line with the principle of user centrism. However, in this case the new accounts were generated automatically in order to spare users effort.
Users who have linked their SWITCH edu-ID account with their existing AAI account(s) have substantially facilitated proper account assignment and account aggregation during conversion. Continue reading →


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Partner event: EduID Mobile App Architecture meeting on 25 April 2017

The “digital transformation” has strong effects on how individuals interact with each other through the use of services – and it adds some challenges to the service operator’s agenda. One such challenge is to deploy consistent identity management across all the devices the “digitally transformed” user may choose from.

For over a decade, SWITCHaai streamlines the user’s (and also the service operator’s) experience by offering a consistent identity management framework across a wide range of web-application services. SWITCH edu-ID is extending this framework to reach beyond web-applications and to also seamlessly integrate with mobile apps.

The project Swiss edu-ID Mobile App (part of swissuniversities’ program “Scientific information”) aims at developing a novel approach to this challenge.

The eduhub Special Interest Group SIG Mobile Learning will discuss this approach and contrast it with other approaches. Interested app developers and service providers are encouraged to register for the event by answering this Doodle poll by 19 April the latest.


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Swiss edu-ID Update Event 2017

Save the date: Thursday 29 June 2017

The focus is put this year on an update about the project Swiss edu-ID and the service SWITCH edu-ID, whose deployment starts in 2017.
Note that no SWITCHaai specific topics are foreseen.

The event will take place June 29 , 11:00 – 16:15, in Berne at UniS, Schanzeneckstrasse 1, room A-126.

Preliminary Programme:

11:00 – 12:00   SWITCH edu-ID for beginners (for people not already familiar with SWITCH edu-ID)

12:00 – 13:15   Arrival for afternoon participants and Lunch
(afternoon participants are warmly welcome to take lunch with us)

13:15 – 14:30   Pilots and current project status

14:30 – 14:55  Coffee break

14:55 – 16:15    Status Migration Strategies, roadmap and next steps

16:15                 End of event

 

Update 2016-06-01: Registration site with updated agenda