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Getting Started with eduGAIN
CAF participates with eduGAIN as it dramatically simplifies and streamlines collaboration on an international level and extends the reach of CAF IdPs and SPs in CAF. Details about eduGAIN participants are other regional/country based federations which can be found on the eduGAIN website.
eduGAIN functions as an international clearinghouse for federation metadata records for identity providers and service providers. eduGAIN is not another federation, but an exchange point for this metadata from federation operators who hold the trust relationships with the IdPs and SPs.
Participants in eduGAIN are only other federation operators and the only way an IdP or SP can be visibile in eduGAIN is to be a member of a participating federation This is done by an opt-in request to CAF at tickets@canarie.ca.
The technical details
Being visible internationally through eduGAIN
Five things need to be done to participate in eduGAIN
1. Indicate that you want to opt-in.
The admin or technical contact for CAF should send an email to tickets@canarie.ca requesting to opt-in to eduGAIN.
2. Prepare your metadata record to be eduGAIN ready.
eduGAIN has a few extra elements for international purposes which are documented in this PDF document. To help validate the metadata entry, use eduGAIN's online test tool.
In order for CAF to publish your record to eduGAIN it must successfully pass validation.
3. Prepare for the international experience for end users
If you are a Service Provider, consider how to present the login experience in a broad international context to allow international users to sign in. CAF encourages services to keep the sign-on experience as simple and clear as possible.
CAF recommends discojuice (http://discojuice.org) as a pre-built or drop-in for this function. This component was sponsored by FEIDE.no, Norway’s peer federation to CAF. The CAF-specific feeds for it can be found on the discojuice site.
4. Configure your Federation trust to include the CAF eduGAIN feed
Your IdP and SP need to know about the entries in eduGAIN as well as CAF. To this point CAF is working on re-publishing the eduGAIN metadata merged with the CAF metadata. Please contact tickets@canarie.ca to request assistance to access this feed.
5. Let CANARIE know you are using eduGAIN!
We would like to list your service on our site leveraging eduGAIN so that people may find it more easily. Please send a note to tickets@canarie.ca to let us know you are using eduGAIN and what your service is, and we will add you to our list of Canadian services using eduGAIN