COmanage

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COmanage is the Collaborative Organization Management Platform developed by the Internet2 Middleware Initiative. It is designed to allow collaborative organizations to flourish, using key collaboration tools in a secure and effective framework. The intent is to externalize identity management services, so that authentication and authorization of group members are handled in a single, efficient process that feeds into the various collaborative applications.

In the COmanage platform, two powerful and rapidly expanding forces are being leveraged -- collaboration and federated identity.

Key to the design of COmanage is that it enables collaboration-centric identity v. application or tool-centric identity. The intent is to externalize identity management, as well as authentication and authorization services (group membership, privilege management, etc.), into the COmanage platform for use by various collaborative applications which have been "domesticated" to function in this way. Several applications have already been domesticated, including Confluence (wiki), Sympa (mailing list management), and Drupal (content management). Forthcoming will be integration with a variety of open source efforts, including audioconferencing, software version control and bug-tracking, calendaring, instant messaging (IM) and chat rooms, web-based file share, etc.

Another distinguishing aspect of COmanage is its open standards internals. This means that COmanage can participate in the foundational attribute ecosystem now being developed. Plumbed into that ecosytem, researchers working in their VO instance of COmanage can access current and maintained class lists as groups to grant VO privileges to. It means that external authorities can provide attributes useful for addressing VO security and privacy issues. The ability to draw and send information across the emergent infrastructure lends power to the collaboration manager and shields them from the details.

In addition, forthcoming versions of COmanage can be launched as an image in commercial cloud computing environments.

COmanage is one of several projects around the world addressing the concerns of tool-centric identity and working on building collaboration management platforms. They vary somewhat in how they do externalization (including SAML, LDAP, MySQL and others) but all are oriented towards providing a common set of identity, group, privilege and related services across a variety of collaboration and domain applications. This community recognizes that different collaboration management platforms do need consistent conversations with applications developers about domestication. For those discussions please see the COmanage CollabIdM wiki (coming soon).

NOTE WELL: All Internet2 Activities are governed by the Internet2 Intellectual Property Framework.

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Active experimentation using a COmanage service has begun, with several fault-tolerant groups using COmanage applications...