Implications

The JISC SURF WBL-Way project is building on the work of SUNIWE to produce a portal to support work-based learning in SURF Foundation Degrees. A similar approach to SUNIWE has been taken but there is no business case for Web services in the WBL-Way portal so portlets interact directly with the institutional databases.

Portlets conforming to the JSR-168 specification are being developed in the WBL-Way project rather than uPortal channels. This is because JSR-168 portlets are inherently more portable which will allow them to be run in the WBL-Way portal and in the Staffordshire University internal Oracle portal. uPortal has been rejected in favour of the LifeRay JSR-168 enterprise portal platform for the WBL-Way portal. LifeRay offers better JSR-168 support than the current version of uPortal and less effort is required to produce a clean look and feel with LifeRay.

Given the emphasis placed by JISC on the service-based approach of the JISC e-Framework, there is a clear need for a Shibboleth-like solution to secure multi-tier systems like SUNIWE (i.e. portal and Web services). The SUNIWE development team have identified the Liberty Alliance Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) as a possible solution. Further investigation and implementation along these lines would benefit any projects with an interest in cross-institutional Web services and portals.

Projects should be aware of the limitations of Shibboleth in cross-institutional environments where a mapping between institutions learner IDs is not present. A future Shibboleth release may include the ability to link accounts between multiple identity providers but currently, users are restricted to a single IdP.