COmanage

Home || Glossary || FAQ || Demo || Wiki || Participate

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 Information and Tour
For information about Collaborative Management Platforms and COmanage as a prototype example, see the list of resources below:

• COmanage Product Roadmap
• COmanage InfoSheet (pdf)
• FAQ

To become a COmanage user, join mailing lists, or participate in development, please visit the participation page.

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

COmanage was the subject of a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at the Spring Internet2 Member Meeting, April 27th, Arlington VA.

COmanage Alpha version released in April 2009. See the COmanage Wiki for details.