Presented at TeraGrid 2011 in Salt Lake City on the advances of SURFconext.

1. SURFconext
Collaboration Without Limits
Harold Teunissen et al. – SURFnet
TeraGrid2011 – July 2011

2. Changing Behaviors
Hierarchical Self Organizing
Secrecy Transparency
Loose Alliance Collaboration
Sluggish Urgency
Novelty Innovation
Tunnel Vision Didactic
Source: Sir Ken Robison
SURFconext - TG11 - July 2011,- Salt Lake City, UT 2

3. Motive
• Cloud cloud cloud — data explosion
• Mobile mobile mobile — device explosion
• Go go go — study + work + play + collaborate +
organize + et cetera
• Collaboration is key to your and your team’s
success!
Source: AMD
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4. Core Business
• Modern universities are developing towards loose
conglomerates of (inter)discipline expertise
‣ Collaboration is therefore a core business
‣ Scientific collaboration involves groups of people
in multiple institutions, disciplines and countries
‣ Collaboration is about using shared services and
resources
• Virtual Organization = People + Groups +
Resources + Services + Policies + Funding + ...
SURFconext - TG11 - July 2011,- Salt Lake City, UT 4

5. Distributed Landscape
• Modern science combines resources from multiple
sources
‣ The core resources are within the VO domain, but
within multiple institutions, and
‣ the generic collaboration services can be found
'the cloud'
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6. Collaboration Entropy
Virtual Laboratory
Virtual Project
Virtual Organi-
zation
Virtual Breeding Environment
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7. Examples
Virtual Laboratory
Virtual Project
Virtual Organi-
zation
al Breeding Environment
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8. Commercial Brake
Short video explaining SURFconext
www.surfconext.nl/en
SURFconext - TG11 - July 2011,- Salt Lake City, UT 8

9. Collaboration Environments
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10. SURFconext — Rationale
• Create open standards glue to make campus and
cloud based services usable for collaboration for
both inter campus and Virtual Organization
scenarios
• Let vendors provide generic and integrated
services as part of the platform, whilst institutions
can add specialist services
• Offer the platform as a service for
smaller & ad-hoc team collaboration
• Offer the platform software for large,
VO-type collaboration run-you-own
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11. Core Components
• Federated Identity Management — SAML
• Groups Management — Grouper
• Social Network 'Portal' technology — OpenSocial
• Collaboration tools
- Document Sharing
- Video Collaboration
- Learning Systems
- Visualization
- Data Mining
- Workspaces
- Et cetera
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12. Federated Identities
• A federation is a collaboration of trust
• Users log in at their institution to get access to
their services
Source: JISC2007
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13. Federation Models
1x1 nxm n+n
Identity Provider Service Provider Federation Hub
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14. Groups
• Based on Grouper technology Internet2
• Groups are -currently- managed centrally
• Any acceptable user can become a group 'admin'
• Groups provide context for applications
(but applications decide on AuthZ!)
• Groups feature (only) 3 roles (admin, collabmin,
member)
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15. Service domestication is key
• Domestication can be described as the process of
externalizing authentication, authorization and
group management from services
• Domestication fits nicely in the Service Oriented
Architecture paradigm where a platform is created
for reusable services and service components
• It becomes easier to share (generic) information
among services and to replace similar services
• It is only useful in multi-domain collaboration so
(delegation of) trust is a point of concern
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16. Advantages Domestication
• Domesticated applications enable single sign-on
features for users, as well as the ability to share
group context between multiple applications
• Main Candidates
- Identity and access control
- Group management
- Events like presence and activities
- Perhaps Monitoring and Reporting and messaging?
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17. Collaboration Services
• In Production
- Commercial services — Alfresco, Liferay, Confluence
- Campus services — Sakai, U. of Amsterdam communities
- SURFnet — Filesender, Foodle, SURFmedia
- Experimental — Big Blue Button, Etherpad
• Pending
- Commercial services — Webex, Adobe Connect, Mendeley,
Google Apps, IBM Lotus Live
- Campus services — 3TU DataCenter, Dataverse Network U of
Utrecht, MyExperiment
- Experimental — Sharepoint2010, Exchange, IMAP
• Wish-list
- Commercial services — LinkedIn, Moodle, Dropbox, Zoho
Apps, Drupal, Ning, Yammer
- Research — iRods, Zotero, Devices, Content
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18. OpenSocial
• General purpose web integration technology by
using Gadgets
• Open 'Social Data' API for exchanging information
on people, groups, activities, et cetera
• Lightweight, '2.0' compliant and 'easy'
• Open standard, browser based components
• Vendor neutral & platform independent
• Large user community → wide spread adoption
• Uptake moving from Social Networks to R&E and
Enterprise
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19. Architecture & Design
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20. Simplified View
SAML2 IdP
Identity Provider
Web Portal Grouper Group Management
Gadget Conext TBD Attribute Management
Engine
OpenSocial TBD Virtual Organizations
Container OpenSocial
Rest
JANUS Service Registry
OpenSocial Rest SAML2 SP SAML2 Metadata
OAuth
Service Provider
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21. Combining existing components
and open standards
SAML2 IdP
Identity Provider
Portal Grouper
TBD Attribute Management
TBD Virtual Organizations
OpenSocial
Rest
JANUS
OpenSocial Rest SAML2 SP SAML2 Metadata
OAuth
Service Provider
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22. So far
• SURFconext Platform up and running for 3 months,
GA in fall 2011
• 3 commercial Service Providers
• 46 Identity Providers
• Piloting with at 5 institutions & VOs
• Hooking up to eduGAIN and other federations
• Initially engaging with Virtual Organizations —
3TU, Clarin, LifeWatch, Bamboo
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23. Bumpy road
• (Service) License models are currently inadequate
• Good business models required for vendors
• Collaboration applications require attributes —
who is going to provide for them?
• International focus is paramount for wide adoption
• Engage early adopters, both at institutions,
vendors, VOs and end users
WARNING
CHALLENGES
AHEAD
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24. OpenConext
• OpenConext is an OpenSource technology stack
for creating and running Collaboration platforms
• Join and contribute www.openconext.org
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25. Getting started
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26. Share services with your team
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27. Demo
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28. harold.teunissen@surfnet.nl haroldteunissen