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USC on iTunes U

June 04, 2009

Transcript of presentation of USC on iTunes U
Powerpoint iTunes U Presentation
Diagram for Operation Between GDS*SHIBBOLETH*SIS

[ After Slide - Course Creation Process ]
Thank you Suh-Pyng for the amazing introduction. Welcome everybody. I’m going to start off by guiding you through the process of how we got to this point of authenticating and authorizing our user base against iTunes U BEFORE I actually show you the Demo. Faculty tend to do this often when they hold your test results back until the end of class, we’ll be doing something similar here to keep you on your toes.

[ iTunes U Login Slide ]
When we first started with iTunes U our first dilema was how to get our students and faculty to login to this system without issuing yet another username and password for them to remember. So we evaluated what information do we need for this sytem: we need student info, enrollment info, and staff & faculty info. It turns out that we needed the exact same information that blackboard uses. After we evaluted the data requirements we determiend that we somehow need to integrate GDS, Shibboleth, SIS, and our own database to create an authentication and authorization method that will work for us. The result is a process that i will walk you through in the next few slides, and hopefully you will be able to set it up as well for your own needs, while learning how USC iTunes U came to be.

[ Process Slide I ]
First, let’s look at What is Shibboleth? Shibboleth is an internet 2 initative that started in 2002, it enables precisely what we were trying to do in this case… have our user base login without re-issuing everyone usernames and password. As we have done at Marshall when we first developed the Portal and as we have done at the Law School when we developed our portal. On your CD i provided the latest code to install on your servers if you want to setup Shibboleth, and this URL will point you to USC specific instructions on how to proceed with the installations. You will need an SSL certificate though, so contact Verisign or Thawte to purchase this before doing an installation. I recommend Thawte for an SSL certificate simply because it is inexpensive, and they turn around certificates in under a week.

[ Process Slide II ]
Recognize this screen? This is the Login Screen for USC Shibboleth, it is the screen you will see when entering places such as Oasis, Class Registration, Software Downloads @ ITS, or USC iTunes U. However, upon logon to this screen you don’t get much except a token. This token doesn’t have much significance, except that it tells you that you have been recognized as a member of USC. At this point we don’t know any attributes about you, so this is where GDS comes in. GDS Provides attributes such as USC ID or USC PVID and soon to come enrollment information as well. However, there lies our problem… enrollment information is not present upon logon, so we need to bring in a third source… this source is SIS. I’m sure many of us in this room have tried to get information from SIS, otherwise known as the vault, but unsuccesfully. So first we filled in the necessary form to request these attributes from the GDS Committee to get an approval on the attributes we needed after a login, we determined these to be just two… USC ID and PVID. The form is included in your CD, and it shows our request exactly as we filled it in. Why did we only request these two attributes? Well, the rest was information we needed from SIS, so we put in a request to SIS. Did i just say “we”? I meant Suh-Pyng, because if i approached SIS asking for attributes they would probably laugh. Now, that we had everything in place, its time to make all these three datasources come together.

[ The Magic Slide ]
Combining everything we have discussed so far and summarizing it we have these steps:
Get an SSL Cert
Install Shib
Install SQL
Get GDS Attributes approved
Provide SIS with XML Schema
Create an SFTP location on your server
Receive and Import SIS Data
Then Form proper authorization credentials

[ Diagram Slide ]
Now let’s see all this in a diagram, to make it clearer. We receive information from SIS, info from GDS… we merge it on our iTunes box via a series of SQL DTS packages, and stored procedures that distribute the data, and then we form a nicely packaged authorization credential to iTunes over SSL. I’m including all the code for the DTS package and the Stored Procedures in your CD as well for reference, to help you put this together as well.

[ Security Slide ]
You might be wondering how is all this data secured? Well, we haven’t forgotten about security at any point during the development. Very few ports need to be opened to the public, and only a few applications need to be installed on a light box to make this magic happen. Let’s review this screen and what we opened in our case… only two ports are open to the general public: 80 and 443. The rest are limited to our subnet, or even further down to just a single machine. Part of the process when working with so much data is to get an audit to assure yourself and others that everything is in good shape. That’s where we proceeded to contact ITS, and with Luke Shepperd’s help the security team performed an audit on the box. The results were great, and we got the seal of approval from an external security team, assuring us we are safe.

[ Applications Slide ]
Before we get to our demo, let’s think of a couple of other applications for this authentication and authorization method. A few that come to my mind… within the MyUSC Portal for instance, we could display to students the classes they are enrolled in together with a list of books for those classes, so that they don’t have to visit the USC Bookstore website, re-authenticate, and generate a booklist. Or for instance in the Software Downloads section of the ITS website we could provide Class specific software to the students upon login, such as SPSS or Visual Studio, which is now distirbuted within class. For instance, if i was enrolled in a computer science course then i would have access to Microsoft’s suite of development tools. Lastly, in my last portal development, the USC Law Portal… i could display a student photo directory based on course enrollment, so that my faculty would have a photo roster. Any other ideas? MyMarshall integration, new media site EX servers, and in the near future blackboard.

[ Demonstration ]
Ok, i think you have been very patient with us thus far, so let’s get started with a login into USC iTunes U. First I’ll login with administrator access to walk you through the basic functionality it offers, then we’ll have Suh-Pyng login with her Faculty access level, and lastly we’ll have a student login to show us what they see

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