AAIportal Project
Introduction
Welcome to the AAI Portal Project
The AAIportal is an authentication portal for the SWITCHaai infrastructure, based on the Shibboleth middleware, and many e-learning platforms.
Currently, the AAIportal brokers between the Swiss SWITCHaai infrastructure, which is based on Shibboleth middleware, and various e-learning resources provided by Swiss institutions of higher education.
Available Resource Adapters
The AAIportal offers adapters to bridge the Shibboleth based SWITCHaai infrastructure with the following type of resources:
- Blackboard CE/Vista Courses
- Blackboard CE/Vista Institution
- WebCT Vista 3 and 4 Courses
- WebCT Vista 3 and 4 Institution
- WebCT CE 4 and 6 Courses
- WebCT CE 4 and 6 Institution
- VITELS Gridlab Courses
- AdLearn Courses
These adapters will use the AAI attributes (UniqueID, Givenname, Surname, Email, ...) of the user to register or log in him into a course or an institution.
Resources Using AAIportal
The actual resources available through the AAIportal include (but are not limited to):
- WebCT CE 4 & 6 e-Learning Platforms at the ETH Zurich and at the University of Berne
- Blackboard Vista e-Learning Platform (Swiss Virtual Campus)
- VITELS Platform (Virtual Internet and Telecommunications Laboratory of Switzerland, UniBE)
- AdLearn Platform (Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders, UniZH)
News
August 7, 2012
The project status was changed to inactive.
March 31, 2011
A new release 1.4.5 of the AAIportal is available for download at SourceForge.
Changes:
- Portal: HTML code injection in events viewer suppressed.
- UI: Only display very generic login error: "Invalid credentials".
August 17, 2008
A new release 1.4.4 of the AAIportal is available for download at SourceForge.
Changes:
- Resource Adapter: New Gridlab adapter.
- Resource Adapter: New Ilias adapter.
- Resource Adapter: New Ilias & Gridlab adapter.
- Admin UI: 'Email to Selected' always send to all bug fixed.
- Admin UI: 'SMS to Selected' always send to all and without SMS numbers bug fixed.
- Admin UI: Email/SMS window 'Cancel & Close' button send email anyway bug fixed.
October 18, 2007
A new release 1.4.3 of the AAIportal is available for download at SourceForge.
The AAIportal 1.4.3 adds support for MySQL 5 and better compatibility with PHP5. Some administrator views have been optimized and more information is available on resource.
Major Changes:
- The invitations are not resent to users already registered to the resource.
- Better error handling added. Every error also appear in the Events Viewer.
- Support for MySQL 5 and PHP5 updated.
September 4, 2007
A new release 1.4.2 of the AAIportal is available for download at SourceForge.
The AAIportal 1.4.2 adds adapters for Blackboard CE/Vista server. Theses adapters are fully compatible with WebCT CE 6 and WebCT Vista 4 server.
Major Changes:
- New Blackboard CE/Vista Institution adapter.
- New Blackboard CE/Vista Course adapter.
- Notification System updated: 'Return-Path' set for outgoing emails.
- Notification System support for Solaris sendmail.
March 7, 2007
A new minor release 1.4.1 of the AAIportal is available for download at SourceForge.
This minor release includes a new Password Protected subscription mode. For each resource you can chose to set the resource key as a password for the subscription. If the user uses the AAIportal interactively, he will be asked for the resource key. If the user uses the direct login url (transparent mode) with AAI, he will be automatically enrolled in the course.
The WebCT Vista and CE6 Institution Adapters have now the possiblility to create a new WebCT user, if he doesn't already exist, without enrolling him in any course.
Major Changes:
- New Password Protected resource subscription mode.
- New Create WebCT User feature added for WebCT Vista and CE6 Institution Adapters.
- The resource key for any resource can now be freely chose or edited.
- PHP on Windows is now fully supported.
September 30, 2006
Major release 1.4.0 of the AAIportal have been published and is available for download at SourceForge.
This new release includes important security fixes to prevent SQL code injections. Therefore, you are encourage to upgrade to this new version.
Portal administrators have a new view 'Events Viewer' to monitor the AAIportal. Events occur when a user or an administrator log in the portal, a user access a resource, a subscription state change, is created or deleted, a user is created or deleted, a resource is created or deleted, ...
Major Changes:
- Security fixes to prevent SQL code injections.
- New Events Viewer view available to monitor the portal.
- New WebCT Vista and Gridlab course Adapter.
- New WebCT CE6 and Gridlab course Adapter.
- Support for Windows have been improved.
- Bug fixes for WebCT CE6 (Application Pack 1).
- Bug fixes to support PHP > 4.4.
Show/Hide Old News
June 30, 2006
New release 1.3.2 of the AAIportal is available for download.
This release includes new admin functionalities and a new resource adapter for 'WebCT CE & Gridlab Course' of VITELS.
Portal and resource administrators can now copy/duplicate exisiting resources. This allows you to create some course templates and duplicate them to instanciate new courses.
Also, now you can filter the resources list in the admin views 'My Resources' and 'All Resources'.
Thanks to Thomas Bernoulli who implemented a new resource adapter for the VITELS project: WEbCT CE 4 Course Gridlab Adapter.
Major Changes:
- New WebCT CE 4 Course Gridlab Adapter (VITELS).
- New Copy/Duplicate of existing resource function added.
- New Filter/Search function added in 'All Resources' and 'My Resources' views.
- Bug fixed for WebCT CE 4 Adapter and registration of new user (get_existing_webctid).
- Bug fixed for WebCT Vista and CE 6 adapters and optional columns StudyBranch3 and StudyLevel character encoding.
April 7, 2006
AAIportal version 1.3.1 have been released.
This release addresses many bugs in version 1.3.0 related to the WebCT CE 4 adapters, the WebCT CE 6 adapters, and the WebCT Vista adapters.
Major Changes:
- WebCT CE 4 adapters bug with existing WebCTID fixed.
- WebCT CE 6 adapters bug with XML validation fixed.
- WebCT CE 6 and WebCT Vista adapters bug with characters encoding (ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8) fixed.
- When editing a Resource and changing the Adapter type, the original parameters are not lost anymore. Modifications only applied when saved.
- New form added for the users to unsubscribe from a Resource. Unsubscribe must be confirm explicitly.
March 3, 2006
AAIportal version 1.3.0 have been released.
The new release add new resource adapters for the WebCT CE 6 platform.
Major Changes:
- New WebCT CE 6 Course adapter.
- New WebCT CE 6 Institution adapter.
- All WebCT adapters have been uniformized.
December 20, 2005
AAIportal version 1.2.0 have been released.
The new release addresses mainly performance and usability issues.
A lot of change have been made to support a lot a users (~5000 users enrolled in portal), to optimize the SQL performance and to add useful tools for the administrators.
Major Changes:
- MySQL 4.1 is required.
- SQL performance have been increased by 100%.
- List User Subscriptions view have been added to manage the subscription of a user subscribed to My Resources.
- List Unused Invitations view have been added to delete or resend Invitations.
- My Users view have been added to manage users subscribed to My Resources.
- All Users view have been added for Portal Administrator to manage all users of the AAI portal.
- All Orphans view have been added for Portal Administrator to manage users without any subscriptions.
- All user lists view have a simple search engine to filter users.
- All user lists view display the Last Login date.
- All views can be paged, with selectable number of records to display.
- All views can be sorted by column name in a consistant way.
- Subscription Administrators can delete their users subscriptions. Reject mode is not supported anymore.
- User error messages have been rewritten and clarified. They include now a Support URL and a Support Email address by default.
- Major rewritting of the core libraries to improve perfomance and stability.
- Automatic Notifications are now much more 'user friendly', and use localized texts.
- A logging engine have been added in the AAIportal.
- WebCT CE Adapter for NET fixes the problem for WebDAV access.
- WebCT Vista Adapter fixes the problem for WebDAV access.
- WebCT Vista 3.0 SSO bug workaround implemented in WebCT Vista Adapter.
April 22, 2005
A new release 1.0.1 of AAIportal is available.
- New WebCT Vista Institution Adapter.
- Improvements of Resource Managers management.
March 24, 2005
After intensive testing and production deployment show-case, the long awaited version 1.0.0 of the AAI Portal have been released.
- New Invitation system. Allows to subscribe users with email.
- New Notification system. Resource providers and users get email notifications.
- New administrator role: Subscription Administrator.
- Self-subscription for resource added.
- Possibility to define delegate for Resources management.
- Transparent (Login URL, Invitation URL) mode implemented.
- WebCT CE and WebCT Vista Plugins fully integrated in portal.
- SWITCHaai look'n'feel login form.
- Lot of bugs fixed.
July 16, 2004
New release 0.9.6 of AAIportal is available to download.
- New WebCT CE and Vista plugins with unified interface.
- WebCT Vista resource adapter compatible with Vista 3.0.
- Bug fixes of localized content and encoding.
March 22, 2004
New release 0.9.5 of AAIportal is available to download.
- Support of WebCT Vista 2.x added with a new Resource Adapter.
- WebCT CE + VITELS Adapter updated.
- New WebCT Vista plugin added.
- Bug fixes with AAI processing and attributes handling.
Download
Download
the AAI Portal software if you want to deploy it on your site.
Documents
Screenshots
Some AAIportal screenshots at SourceForge.net
Articles
- Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure: Portal Architecture and Prototype Implementation.
This article discusses the rationals for the AAI Portal, the
architecture of the portal and the integration in an Authentication and
Authorization Infrastructure.
Links
Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI)
- SWITCHaai
- The project home page for the Authentication and
Authorization Infrastructure in the Swiss national research and education network.
- Shibboleth
- The project home page for Shibboleth, the software used for SWITCHaai.
Partners
- NET ETHZ
- Network for Educational Technology group of the ETHZ
- Swiss
Virtual Campus
- The project home page for Swiss Virtual Campus. The Swiss
Virtual Campus promotes learning over the Internet at university level
and has mandated the development of the AAI Portal.
- VITELS
- VITELS is a partner resource provider at the University of Bern.
- edutech.ch
- Edutech is a mandate of the Swiss Virtual Campus program.
Its role is to support the SVC in technological matters.
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