Statement of Direction
The University of Texas at Arlington Office of Information Technology has adopted these strategic goals as part of an initiative to offer robust, secure, scalable, interoperable infrastructure for identity management, centralized authentication and authorization, and inter-institutional collaboration:
- offer a standards-based, platform agnostic authentication system, with one username and password per person, stored in a central repository, that is authoritative for access to all University services and applications
- offer a standards-based, platform agnostic authorization system to allow for centralized authorization, provisioning, and group management, and enabling electronic relationship management
- provide a single point of entry for all directory-enable services, products, and automated systems
- provide a consolidated standards-based directory which can provide consistent and complete information on students, faculty, staff, courses, organizations, and other electronically-describable entities and relationships
- preserve or enhance the user experience
- embrace open standards and established RFCs to ensure flexibility and interoperability and extension of services
To meet these goals, the infrastructure will be based upon the available standards and best practices:
- Lightweight Directory Access Protocol version 3 compliant directory services as defined by RFC 3377, 2251-2256, 2229-2830, et al.
- Kerberos 5 authentication as defined by RFC 1508-1510, 1964, 2743-2744, et al.
- EDUCAUSE and Internet2 initiatives such as the eduPerson LDAP schema, Shibboleth, and other innovative technologies