PAWS Meeting 2006-10-30

Discussion of Central Login for PAWS Adaptive applications

Overview
Centralized login is an analog of .Net Passport. There exists a unified storage of identities (here user identities) that applications refer to and rely on when it comes to registration of new users and authentication o existing.


Motivation for the centralization of a login
- a lot of users use multiple applications but have separate logins for them
- maintaining user identities at the site of each application is costly and ineffective

Note
User identity is not user model/profile, user application specific data about user is not a part of identity

User Identity fields

• Mandatory fields
• Name: Last, Given
• Login
• Password
• Recommended
• email
• gender
• Optional
• Organization/Affiliation
• City + State (Region outside U.S.)
• ZIP (Postal code)
• Country
• Comments (How did you hear about us, etc)

Incorporating group and group membership information has been postponed till further more thorough discussion.

Planned course of action
- developers should provide their user identity data for future merger
- identity data should be retrieved from Central User Identity Store and not from a local application
- conflicts in user names should be resolved in an organized fashion when needed
- interface of interaction with User Identity store to be presented later