InCommon is a federated identity consortium. It sets up the trust that is needed for information providers (like JStore) to authenticate the students and employees at colleges and universities trying to use their services. At F&M, when someone tries to access information on a server that is located here, we use LDAP to authenticate them so that the server can decide if they are authorized to access that information. When that information is not at F&M, authentication becomes much more difficult, which is where Shibboleth and InCommon come in. They provide the bridge between the information provider and the information consumer. We are in the final stages of getting setting up this bridge at F&M.I noticed a lot more buzz about InCommon at the conference. The reason for this is a shift in emphasis. When I went to Interop in May, the talk was about what needed to be done IF you moved to the cloud. At Educause, it was a discussion about WHEN you moved to the cloud.
The Internet2 organization seems to understand this. They have started a new initiative called Net+ which is all about providing services, and not about the network itself. They are busy brokering deals with SaaS vendors to make it easy for members of Internet2 to use these services. The model is that Internet2 contracts with the vendor and then the colleges and universities that want that service are billed by Internet2.
InCommon fits into this model and in some ways is the keystone that makes it work. In order the colleges and universities to be able to work with information providers, they need to have a mechanism for authentication. So as Internet2 is working with the vendors, they are getting them hooked up to Internet2 and getting them into InCommon.
With Internet2 pushing InCommon and more and more vendors coming on board, I expect mentions of InCommon to become more common.
