New Service: Talis Aspire

Page last modified on 05 August 2011, at 09:41 AM (initially posted on 3 May 2011)

Talis Aspire is a next-generation resource list management system for higher education institutions.

It is provided by Talis Education Limited, part of the Talis Group.

N.B: This service requires a SAML2-compliant IdP.

User accountability: required.

Notes:

1. The only attribute that an identity provider must release for its users to be able to access many services that are licensed for use by everyone at a particular organisation is eduPersonScopedAffiliation. This is a scoped attribute, which might, for example, have the value "member" in scope "uni.ac.uk", often written as:

It is used for the basic authorisation decision: does uni.ac.uk subscribe to the service in question? If so, the user is allowed access. The service provider will maintain its own list of which organisations (scopes) can access its service. For allowed organisations, the federation's Technical Recommendations for Participants indicate that, in HE/FE, users with scoped affiliation values from the set {member, student, staff, faculty, employee} are typically authorised to access content licensed on the basis of the JISC Model Licence, while {affiliate, alum} are not.

While a Shibboleth identity provider can generate eduPersonScopedAffiliation statically by setting the required value in attribute-resolver.xml, this should only be done when it is known that all users are authorised. Otherwise, the value can be picked up from your LDAP / Active Directory as described on the IdP setup page.

Users of other IdP software should check their documentation.

2. Many services can make use of the eduPersonTargetedID attribute. This is a persistent opaque identifier, which enables service personalisation (remembering data about a user over different login sessions) without the service provider knowing who the user is. If the identity provider supplies the eduPersonTargetedID attribute, the session is treated similarly to an Athens personal account. Otherwise, the service's personalisation features (e.g., saved searches) may be disabled, though the service will still function in the same way as with Athens shared accounts. With some services (e.g., Zetoc Alert) this attribute is mandatory. If so, it is marked as "Required/Yes" in the table in Attribute Usage.

For a Shibboleth IdP, generation of eduPersonTargetedID in attribute-resolver.xml is described on the IdP setup page.

Release of eduPersonTargetedID by attribute-filter.xml is described further down the same page.

Users of other IdP software should check their documentation.

9. Some services (including EDINA services which require individual user registration) will only grant access to users from an identity provider marked in the UK federation metadata as offering user accountability as defined in section 6 of the federation's Rules of Membership. Identity providers that offer user accountability are marked by having an <AccountableUsers> element within the <Extensions> element of the IdP's <EntityDescriptor>.

18. eduPersonEntitlement is an optional attribute that can be used to provide either a list of enrolled module codes (see FAQ question 2 at http://support.talisaspire.com/entries/382415-devolved-authentication-guidelines-for-talis-aspire), or devolved constraints (see http://support.talisaspire.com/entries/445432-implementing-devolved-constraints) to Talis Aspire.