Single Sign On - watchdog iDp

We have been in a process for the last couple of months, in reality since the knowledgeNET conference. We have been working with watchdog on implementing their Single Sign On service. This has been a busy development for all parties involved. It has required knowledgeNET to finish developing the requirements for SSO, in which they have completed and we are the first successful school to use Single Sign On with them, and it has now reduced some of the issues that we have had with passwords.

In the past we have had to add all of our students manually, well export them from our Student Management System, SMS, and we implemented the websync service just after it was released. This now makes provisioning students a lot easier. Though we still have an issue with the format of our student logins, which require someone to change manually.

Another issue we have found is the issues of the original development and focus of knowledgeNET, which was schoolsonline.co.nz, this is what is represented in the google search for our knowledgeNET system. This is causing a few headaches, but we are slowly working our way around this and updating our school website and login pages to show this change, we wish that there was a reload or a refresh when someone logged in through the schoolsonline page that would then point it straight away to our knowledgeNET site.

The second service that was activated was google apps. This has been a simple change over and is working well.

The third service is mahara, myportfolio.school.nz. This one is taking a little bit longer to get going and implemented. At the moment we have one student who is using the SAML login, which does not work, I am hoping that this week will be when we get all of it working. There is still one more service that we can get activated for our iDp service, however, I am unsure at present what we get...

Also with knowledgeNET we are after some real estate on their navigation bar, this will mean that we can include icons on the bar for students to access these service straight away. this has now been added as a development ticket for future work.

Wether it be, access-it library, wikieducator, or a number of other services. This will be a conversation that we next have at our ICT meeting.