OpenConext showcases

SURFconext

SURF is a collaborative organisation of Dutch educational and research institutions in which members combine their strengths. Together with the affiliated institutions, SURF makes every effort to provide the best possible digital services, knowledge sharing, and innovation.

With SURFconext, SURF-members can access various cloud services with just one login: single sign-on. In addition, SURFconext facilitates collaboration and group management - both within and between organisations - with trusted authentication and authorisation. SURFconext continues to grow; the overall count of logins and the total of unique users still rises. Take a look at the current statistics of SURFconext.

Inspiring SURFconext practitioners

Read more about single sign-on access to cloud services, developing educational portals, and international collaboration in successful SURFconext projects.

'The 1 million logins per day show that SURFconext offers great value for education and research in the Netherlands. With SURFconext, SURF ensures secure and privacy-friendly access for users of more than 200 organisations; at their own organisation, at SURF and other member organisations.'

Femke Morsch, product manager SURFconext - SURF

Kennisnet

Kennisnet is the public organisation for education and ICT. It provides a national basic ICT infrastructure, advises the sector councils and shares knowledge with primary education, secondary education and senior secondary vocational education (MBO) in the Netherlands.

Opportunity to grow and new technologies

With the approaching end-of-life of the identity federation software that Kennisnet used, it was time to investigate a successor. Continued use of existing functionalities and scalability were a must. Kennisnet was also interested in using new functionalities, something that was not possible with the old software. They were already enthusiastic about SURF's use of OpenConext: SURFconext. Openconext also appeared to offer exactly what they needed.

The actual implementation went smoothly and was completed within one year. Kennisnet implemented specific wishes, which they gave back to the community. They designed the OpenConext software completely in their own style: Entree Federation. It gives 1.6 million teachers and pupils access to digital learning resources from 150 providers.

FCCN

FCCN is the Portuguese NREN and Scientific Computing Unit of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, which aims to contribute to the development of Science, Technology and Knowledge in Portugal.

FCCN provides high-speed Internet connectivity and IT services to the Portuguese higher education and research system. More than six hundred thousand students, researchers and staff can rely on FCCN’s national education network, every day. FCCN is also responsible for the authentication and authorization infrastructure, RCTSaai, that simplifies access to web services for the higher education and research communities.

Why adopt Openconext?

To simplify and respond to the new challenges of digital identity. The adoption of Openconext for the RCTSaai federation aimed to simplify processes, namely access to services, allowing entities participating in the federation to carry out just one iteration to access all services, instead of the previous method which required the configuration of each service individually.

On the services end, Openconext also simplifies the technical integration and widens the range of services that can join the federation by supporting the two most commonly used open standard protocols, i.e SAML and OpenID Connect.

Finally, with the implementation of Openconext, we can now enhance user identities by incorporating information from sources beyond their home institution's identity provider. This is achieved by enabling the addition of extra attribute sources such as ORCID and Collaboration Groups, which can then be passed on to the relevant services.