What is SURFconext?
SURFconext is a next generation collaboration infrastructure that creates new opportunities to collaborate online based on a combination of applications from different providers. Researchers, educators and students wish to select the tools that best fit their online collaboration needs. Institutions and virtual organizations struggle with the integration of self-hosted services with commercial cloud services and service providers seek for ways to make their services easily accessible for users in higher research and education. SURFconext offers interesting clues to facilitate these needs.
The SURFconext service is a flexible and open standards based collaboration infrastructure that connects a number of basic building blocks for online collaboration.
The core building blocks of the SURFconext infrastructure are:
Federated authentication based on the SAML standard
Federating applications enables single sign-on to many different applications in a safe and simple way. Services for federated authentication are in use within Higher Education e.g. SURFfederatie in the Netherlands, InCommon in the US and UK Access federation in the UK. Almost seventy Dutch higher education and research institutions and a large number of collaboration services are connected to the SURFfederatie.
Centralized group management
By centralizing group management users can determine which users are authorized to access certain resources, at a single spot. This approach makes it much easier to keep the membership roster consistent across applications. SURFnet provides the SURFteams service to organize group management for inter-institutional online collaboration. SURFteams is based on the Grouper tool which is used by many Universities in the US and the UK.
Social networking technology based on the OpenSocial standard
Research and Education are inherently social activities. To support the social aspect of online collaboration, OpenSocial offers useful concepts to standardise the exchange of profile, friend, group and activity data between applications. In addition, it provides portal technology to bring functionality of different applications in one single screenview. OpenSocial has recently be embraced by established players in the enterprise software market. Read the OpenSocial for the Enterprise Whitepaper to learn more about requirements for enterprise social systems and how OpenSocial can be used to address the collaboration needs of professionals.
The presence of suitable online collaboration tools supporting the above mentioned standards
In cooperation with users in the field, the SURFconext team aims at identifying and connecting suitable collaboration tools that fit with the above mentioned standards. These collaboration tools may be offered by various different providers either by SURFnet, our member institutions and external (commercial) cloud service providers.
SURFconext, for higher education and research
SURFconext has been developed for and in collaboration with the higher education and research sector in The Netherlands. For institutions, the launch of SURFconext offers an occasion to join forces and to draw a common strategy for online collaboration. At the same time it facilitates lightweight integration of self-hosted institutional services with (commercial) cloud services.
For researchers, educators and students SURFconext offers new ways to satisfy their online collaboration needs. Via the SURFconext infrastructure, best of breed applications from different providers can be accessed with one single account and used side by side.
SURFconext, availability and how to get involved
Connecting to SURFconext is a simple and logical next step. During a beta phase of six months, from January-August 2011, a fixed number of organizations will be invited to participate in a SURFconext pilot. From August 2011 onwards all institutions participating in the SURFfederatie will automatically be connected to SURFconext and SURFnet will release a service level specification (SLS) for SURFconext.
A growing set of online collaboration services will be provided via SURFconext. This will involve services from commercial parties, insitutions and SURFnet. SURFnet offers SURFmedia as well as several experimental services like Foodle, Filesender and Etherpad. Commercial solutions like Alfresco Edu Share, Liferay Social Office and Atlassian Confluence Wiki will become available after purchase of the required licenses.
To demonstrate the features of SURFconext to a full extent, SURFnet implemented an OpenSocial based demo portal. This portal offers single sign-on, groupmanagement tools, functionality to create and personalise a collaboration environment and, opportunities to use applications from different providers side by side.
Some advantages of SURFconext
- Based on open standards like SAML and OpenSocial which facilitate “loosely coupled” system integration.
- Single Sign-On via SURFfederatie.
- SURFteams for constructing teams. Authorisation can be arranged for each team and a group context can be created (for example so that content and information is offered only if it is relevant for the team).
- Reuse of tools and software code (“Write once, deploy anywhere”).
- Institutions can develop their own institutional portal based on the open source portal software provided by SURFnet.
- SURFnet is collaborating with institutions and both national and international partner organisations (for example Internet2, OpenSocial Foundation, and SURFdiensten) to expand the range of online applications provided by third parties and other institutions.
- Opportunities for institutions to share resources e.g. Electronic Learning Management Systems.
SURFconext continues to develop
SURFnet is continuing to develop the SURFconext service, for example by providing a growing set of online collaboration applications. SURFnet is specifically focusing not only on linking up generic online applications with SURFconext but also linking up research tools and resources.
Development of the SURFconext service was supported with funding from the SURFworks and Gigaport innovation projects.