CANARIE - Canadian Access Federation

Join the growing list of Canadian Access Federation service providers to Canadian higher education who already enable research, discovery, and learning on the move!

• CAF provides reach for service providers to over 40% of the university population of students, faculty and staff in Canada – Canada’s largest universities are already participants of CAF with more participants joining every month.
• Canadian Colleges are joining CAF – Colleges in Canada enrol more than 1.5 million students. Canada’s colleges are rapidly building capacity in applied research and are becoming dependent on e-resources to support that activity – a whole new set of customers for e-service providers.
• On-boarding of your Canadian clients is streamlined – Your incremental costs for integration as you add additional customers are sharply reduced as integration efforts required per participant disappear due to the consistent and open Shibboleth based standards employed by CAF. These consistent open standards make it possible for smaller organizations with limited internal IT expertise to come onboard easily and access service providers with limited effort.
• You offload the burden of managing identity — Save time, effort, and money by channelling your customers to adopt a consistent integration point with your service already implemented by CAF participants. Custom integration disappears.
• Above all, you meet you customers’ needs – Modern educational organizations must meet learner needs or lose market share to those who do. Modern learners are mobile; modern organizations must be too. Service providers who meet organization needs will preserve and grow markets. CAF participation allows a service provider to meet the needs of a growing customer base while reducing cost and complexity.

Participation in Canadian Access Federation provides participants with the ability to provide  their research, academic and administrative users access to a wider range of services and resources, and supports collaboration with colleagues in Canada and around the world.

What this means to participants:

• improved identity management practices, including reducing the need to maintain guest accounts
• better service to your users
• improved access to the services and resources required to support cross organizational activities (i.e., teaching, research or administrative)
• reduced identity and access support problems  

As a researcher, staff member, or student at a university or publicly funded research organization, participation allows you to access content, services or resources of participating organizations  without having to set up, remember or maintain separate user-id’s for each.  

You’ll get secure access to wireless networks and web-based resources using the user-id and password provided by your home organization when you are visiting another organization.

As additional services are identified and federated solutions implemented you will be able to access such things as: 

• data collections and data grids,
• scientific instruments, modelling and visualisation tools, and computing resources,
• collaboration environments and workspaces for virtual teams,
• scholarly resources and publications,
• eLearning resources and learning object collections, and
• national higher education and research administrative systems.

So what does this mean for you?

• no more lists of user-ids to access the services and resources you need 
• no need to disclose additional personal information over and over again in order to access the services and resources you need
• easier access to the resources made available by other participants and commercial service providers, and
• easier access to the tools you need to collaborate with colleagues in Canada and around the world