The JISC announce funding of the current Athens service to July 2008

On Mon 27th Feb the JISC announced the continued funding for the current Athens service to be free at the point of use for UK HE and for FE colleges in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to July 2008. The JISC also announced it would fund gateways enabling Athens and Shibboleth® interoperability.

Eduserv has committed to continuing to offer the Athens service beyond 2008 and we expect many institutions will wish for the foreseeable future to use this service. We will continue to develop the service capability and its interoperability with international standards and commercial products, and we are committing now to providing the Athens service to institutions from 2008 onwards at no more than 50p per university member per annum.

We also intend to offer cost effective support to institutions choosing to develop a Shibboleth® architecture capability. We expect to develop fully supported resilient and user-friendly software.

Our access and identity management roadmap outlines some of the developments we plan over the next few years. This includes the development of a business case template to facilitate institutional review of access management options, which we intend to publish in April and which we hope may inform the development of institutional access management policy in the light of the options outlined in our letter to institutions of 3 March.

March 2006