SURFnet opensources OpenConext collaboration platform
Niels van Dijk
Sorry beforehand for any cross posting.
It is my pleasure to inform you that today at TNC2011 in Prague, we have Open
Sourced the SURFconext collaboration platform, as the OpenConext
project, http://www.openconext.org
OpenConext is an open technology stack for creating and running
Collaboration platforms. It uses technologies from Federated Identity
Management, Group management and OpenSocial based Social Networking
Technology. The aim of the software product is to provide a middleware
platform that can combine generic and specialized collaboration tools
and services, within Research and Education and beyond, and make
these available for collaboration over institutional and national borders.
OpenConext was developed by SURFnet as part of the SURFworks
programme. SURFnet runs an instance of the platform for research and
education in The Netherlands as SURFconext (http://www.surfconext.nl)
OpenConext is build on top of many already available OpenSource
products. Core building blocks include: Corto, Janus, Apache Shindig
and the Apache Rave incubator project, as well as Grouper, Shibboleth
and SimpleSamlphp. Some of these are wrapped by OpenConext to be
easily integrated into the platform, others are used mostly out of the
box and only need configuration to work with the platform.
The links to source code repositories are available on the OpenConext
wiki, together with installation instructions in the source code and
some additional information on this wiki. With this information
technically oriented people should be able to install, configure and
run the platform for their own use. If you choose to do so, please
please drop us a message, we are keen to learn what use cases you have
with the platform. We also welcome any collaboration on further
development on the platforms components and technologies.
Contact details for the OpenConext team at SURFnet can be found in the
support section of the wiki. Note that we are currently only providing limited
support, via a mailinglist and a Jira bugtracker.
All source code that is not already covered under another license, is
licensed by SURFnet under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
Kind regards,
Niels van Dijk,
SURFnet, The Netherlands
