http://www.incommonfederation.org/
I’ve known about Shibboleth for a few years now, but to be honest haven’t followed it that closely, in part because, as important as issues of authentication and authorization are, they typically bore the *!#$ out of me. So I had Shibboleth filed in the back of my mind as ‘hey neat idea, I’ll wait a few years and maybe this will move from idea to testbed implementation.’
Wow, time flies, and folks involved with Shibboleth have clearly not been fooling around – not only is there already this very real production level federation called InCommon, but they have a nifty ‘starter’ program called InQueue which allows organizations just starting with Shibboleth and federated trust to try it out.
For those who are wondering ‘what the heck is he talking about?’, check out the Shibboleth ‘About’ page which has about as short an explanation as you can give, or else this recent Educause presentation by Michael Gettes which also does a nice job of explaning it. Long story short – as more organizations join federations, you’ll likely be able to get access to protected materials you couldn’t before without individually having to arrange that access.- SWL