Boosting Shibboleth support for Bradford College

Bradford College implemented Shibboleth in 2008 to give students and staff secure access to digital resources. Several years later, without specialist resource in the IT team to troubleshoot issues quickly, the college retained a managed service from a commercial provider but charges for updates were mounting.

In 2023 the college asked Jisc’s trust and identity consultancy service if we could offer better value and a more responsive service.

As an organisation we’re a one-stop-shop for many trust and identity services and our consultancy advice can help you choose the ones you need – and then get the most out of them. We’re also active in the wider trust and identity community, helping to shape services and make sure they continue to meet changing user needs. Take Shibboleth, for example. Jisc is a principal member of the Shibboleth Consortium, working to keep the Shibboleth software current and open source to benefit all its users.

When Tim Gildersleeve, Bradford College’s virtual learning environment (VLE) and systems manager, got in touch we started by reviewing the Shibboleth deployment and then set out several options, as well as our own recommendation for best value and simplicity.

Simple solution

The college has a lot of technical expertise in-house, so to reach an optimal solution they deployed the open-source operating system Debian GNU/Linux on the college’s virtual infrastructure and then Jisc deployed Shibboleth onto the platform. The project was completed collaboratively over Zoom calls in about three hours, split over three days to minimise disruption to the college’s ‘business as usual’.

Tim says the implementation was seamless and left the in-house team with new capabilities to manage routine ongoing maintenance and updates themselves:

“The engineer talked us through the installation and recorded it for us to refer to, so it was a great learning experience.”

The college has also taken out a retained expertise package. This is an option that gives customers access to subject specialists to discuss ideas, develop skills and just help if things go wrong. The package is always tailored to what we anticipate a customer might need. In Bradford College’s case this means eight hours of support per year, although the package can be adjusted up or down as necessary so customers don’t pay for things they don’t need. It’s a useful back-up and Tim says:

“If there’s ever an issue now it is a minor inconvenience, and we can either make the changes ourselves or screenshare with Jisc to sort things remotely.”

Benefits

Like every organisation Bradford College is managing its budgets carefully, and every opportunity to reduce expenditure is valuable. The cost of implementing our solution (around £3,000) was recouped within months. Moving forward, Tim says:

“The annual retained expertise contract is excellent value. It costs about an eighth of what we were paying before, and because we’re working with Jisc not a commercial business we can look into where else in the college we could invest unused time.”

For the library staff, we are an extra pair of hands at busy times. Our fast response times help them maintain access to resources. These days system updates come thick and fast, and academic liaison librarian Deborah Duffy values knowing the college’s version of Shibboleth is being kept fully up to date and that we’ll help if anything goes wrong with a data provider, to keep resources available. As the college continues its focus on student experience, she says this is becoming ever more important in the college’s strategy:

“If students lose access to digital resources at home they’ll often come into college and access them via IP, but we need them to be confident they can work anywhere at any time, and that their annotations will be preserved.”