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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Signet?

Signet is a centrally administered system that supports distributed privileges management. Administrators and Business Analysts first model the privilege requirements, from the business practices of an organization to the simpler requirements of a single application or service, in a set of distinct rules. Applications may need to be enabled to accept information from Signet. Once this is done, users can begin to assign and delegate their privileges through a simple and intuitive web interface.

Who needs Signet?

Any institution that has a variety of services and systems from multiple vendors knows how challenging it is to simultaneously manage and track privileges in many environments. Signet provides a better way to coordinate and automate the enabling and disabling of privileges though a common interface. From a virtual organization to a department to an entire institution, Signet is capable of scaling to any size deployment. All communities that need to manage their permissions in a flexible way will benefit from Signet.

How can Signet help my institution?

Unified management of privilege information has a number of distinct advantages. Roles across all applications can be aggregated and flexibly assigned to individuals, and permissions for individuals can be quickly and globally understood and revoked when needed. Signet maintains a privileges history, which can reveal the state and origin of permissions across the enterprise for painless audits. The institution as a whole can operate more smoothly as the power to act flows from and to where it's needed.

What makes Signet different?

Unlike other workflow solutions, Signet is focused on the people that make work happen, rather than the systems behind the scenes.

What do I need to use Signet?

A full-featured deployment of Signet can be installed on virtually any OS with a single download, installation, and script. Production deployment of Signet is designed to utilize enterprise-class components, such as an enterprise directory, authentication system, and relational database. Each enhancement is optional, but increases the utility and power of Signet. Signet itself is a Java-based program toolkit, and its user interface runs in a standard Servlet Container, such as Tomcat.

Who made Signet?

Signet evolved out of the Stanford Authority Manager that has been in use at Stanford University since 1998. The original developers worked with MACE and the Internet2 community to define a set of requirements to generalize the system to the variety of environments encountered in Higher Ed.

Does Signet integrate well with others?

Interoperation with widely used open-source identity management software was a primary design consideration.  Most software that exports standard middleware interfaces will be usable with Signet. Shibboleth, Grouper, and Nexus are all excellent partners for a Signet deployment.  Significantly more work may be needed to empower applications to use Signet.

Have a question that is not listed above? If you cannot find an answer to your question in the Signet Documentation, please contact us.