Cv Builder Final Report

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CV Builder Final Report 1.0 (Draft) 8th September 2008

JISC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES

Project Document Cover Sheet

PROJECT REPORT

ProjectProject Acronym CVBuilder Project ID

Project Title Hosted Shibboleth Base CV Builder for the East Midlands area

Start Date October 2006 End Date October 2007

Lead Institution Nottingham Trent University

Project Director Ian Griffiths

Project Manager &contact details

Francis LowryInformation Systems

Nottingham Trent UniversityNottinghamNG1 4BU

Tel: 0115 848 8514Email: [email protected]

Partner Institutions New College NottinghamWest Nottinghamshire College

Project Web URL www.ntu.ac.uk/cvbuilder

Programme Name (and

number)

e-Learning capital programme (0306)

Programme Manager David Kernohan

DocumentDocument Title Final report

Reporting Period October 06 October 07

Author(s) & project role Francis Lowry Programme Manager

Date 13th October 2008 Filename CVBuilder Final Report

URL

Access Project and JISC internal General dissemination

Document HistoryVersion Date Comments

0a-0d Internal drafts

1 September 08 Draft submitted to Programme Director, Project Team

2 October 08 Final report submitted to Programme Director, project team andpartners.

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Hosted Shibboleth Base CV Builder for the East Midlands

area

(CVBuilder)

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Table of ContentsAcknowledgements................................................................................................................................ 5Executive Summary...............................................................................................................................5Background............................................................................................................................................7Aims and Objectives.............................................................................................................................. 8Methodology..........................................................................................................................................9

Implementation....................................................................................................................................14Outputs and Results............................................................................................................................16Outcomes............................................................................................................................................18Conclusions.........................................................................................................................................20Implications.......................................................................................................................................... 20References..........................................................................................................................................20Appendixes.......................................................................................................................................... 21

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AcknowledgementsThis project was conducted under the JISC e-Learning capital programme (3/06). Project partnerswere: Nottingham Trent University, New College Nottingham and West Nottinghamshire College. Wewould especially like to thank the East Midlands RSC for providing us with valuable input with respectto proofing our Shibboleth installation processes, and giving us a platform to communicate morewidely to institutions in the East Midlands.

The Shibboleth mail lists, and the primary Shibboleth Wiki have also proved an invaluable resourcewhile working through some of the more detailed technical aspects of Shibboleth.

The project would particularly like to acknowledge the help and support of the following: Clive Church JISC-CETIS and Edexcel. Shirley Blakemore New College Nottingham Liz Butterworth, originally from West Nottinghamshire College Keith Mellor, West Nottinghamshire College Paul Hacking, NTU

Executive SummaryDevelopment of a CV Builder toolThe primary aim of the project was to create a CV Builder and publish it as a service for use byeducational institutions in the East Midlands. Although delayed within the projects original timeframe,the development has been completed and we are in the process of launching both the service and thetool as an open source product. With the exception of placing the Web Services framework into aproduction stage, we have successfully completed and implemented all the functional components ofthe system.

The research and modelling of the new system was based on analysis of CVs currently in use andbest practice as promoted on on-line recruitment companies. Mapping the data to the UK Leapspecification was not as fruitful as anticipated, although though not a complete surprise, as the set of

data elements actually used within a CV is considerably less than that supported by UK Leap. Apositive point is that all the specific data elements identified within the CV analysis had acorresponding element in the specification.

CVBuilder as an exemplar for UK Federation and shared services.Our perception of the environment at the onset of the project was that the emphasis on Shibboleth,Federated Access, and the UK Federation was primarily concentrated on the technology, and itsreplacement as the authentication framework for Athens. We were keen to find a good exampledemonstrating the types of services and systems that could be developed, promoted and facilitated byhaving a federated access framework in place.

Although, the release of the software as open source appears to reduce the potential market forsubscribing to our service, the actual development and idea has enabled us to get conversations

started about the benefits of federated access.

Support for Shibboleth.For various reasons detailed in this report, the emphasis on the Shibboleth aspects of the projectshifted from a secondary aim to having equal weight in terms of effort and import to our partners andthe FE community and universities with a comparable technology stack to us.

Rather than just provide our previous installer and supporting documentation, we completelyoverhauled our previous work in this area and produced a full end to end set of documentation forimplementing Shibboleth on Windows. This work has been very well received, especially in the periodsince JISC and Eduserv announced the ending of JISC funding for Athens services.

Collaboration with partners.

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BackgroundThis project has built upon the work undertaken by Nottingham Trent University as a sub-projectwithin the Regional Interoperability Project on Progression for Lifelong Learning (RIPPLL) projectfunded by JISC and undertaken jointly with the University of Nottingham, and previous NTU JISCproject work on the East Midlands Shibboleth Service (EMSS). The work within the RIPPLL projectfocussed on the transition of a subset of PDP data via web services using Shibboleth as the

authentication framework. The underlying technical component of the EMSS project was Shibbolethand its implementation in the Microsoft Windows environment.

Through our previous work on EMSS we identified that a lot of institutions did not realise whatopportunities would be made available once they were part of a federated access framework i.e. thebenefits that could be realised once they stopped focusing on Shibboleth as a replacement forAthens. We wanted to take the opportunity to develop a production system demonstrating they type ofservices that could be developed across organisations once a working shibboleth infrastructure was inplace i.e. shifting the focus from Shibboleth the technology to the opportunities afforded by afederated access framework.

Through previous work with the RIPPLL project and our focus on the transitioning of PDP data usingUK Leap, we had identified that both our existing PDP and CV Builder solutions were very inflexible inwhat they could do compared to what was technically possible now and that they both did not facilitateeasy transitioning of learner data.

Of the two existing products, the CV Builder was chosen as a tool for further development primarilybecause its limitations i.e.

Single CV i.e. it only allowed for one CV, if you wished to produce multiple CVs for differingpurposes, you had to edit the data each time, and then save the output as a Word document.

Limited presentation options i.e. output was as HTML and you could only download it as a.doc and open in Word.

Limited formatting facilities i.e. although you could customise a Word document after the fact,the CV Builder itself only allowed you to order data sections and include / exclude specific

sections.

were well known and we had clear ideas of exactly what was needed to be done to improve it. Inaddition, given that the term Curriculum Vitae (CV), its purpose, and its relevance to learners of allages is universally understood. The combination of taking our existing CV Builder, implementing theenhancements previously identified, and re-engineering its login and authentication framework toutilise Shibboleth, gave us a very demonstrable and immediately practical solution.

In order to ensure that we had a live environment to run the CV Builder system through, it wasimperative that all three organisations in the partnership had functioning shibboleth infrastructures.Both of our partners had complementary technology infrastructures, Windows Servers, IIS, ActiveDirectory, SQL Server etc. so our existing installation processes developed through the EMSS projectcould be enhanced to encompass their environments and the combined output could help assist other

organisations with a similar infrastructure.

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Aims and Objectives

The primary aim of the project is to develop, build and deploy a service which will enable any learnerwith a Shibboleth account in the East Midlands area to create dynamic CV. The hope is that this willdemonstrate how the UK Federation and the Shibboleth infrastructure can enable institutions, overand above just replacing Athens.

The secondary aim of the project was to provide support for the installation and configuration of asuitable Shibboleth environment with both our partner colleges with the provision of appropriatelearning materials and documentation to allow other institutions with little or no knowledge of thetechnologies supporting Shibboleth to implement their own environments.

Objectives and how they changed during the course of the project

1. Develop a CV Builder data repository where the learner can store all the components requiredto build a CV in a relational database with appropriate web based data entry andmanagement screens.

No changes were made to this objective

2. Implement Shibboleth IdP at partner institutions where it does not already exist so thatmembers of each partner institution can access the CV Builder.


3. Develop a framework to allow remote learner data to be referenced by the CV Builder serviceusing Web Services protected by a Shibboleth SP at each partner institution.

Changes: The objective has not changed, however the framework is at the internaltesting phase at this point and has not progressed sufficiently to allow partnercolleges to do testing.

4. Identify local learner data (where the data already exists) that can be referenced by the CVBuilder service. Where possible, these basic PDP components required to build a CV will bemade available via web services from each partner institution.

Changes: This has only been completed for Nottingham Trent, as delays in thecompletion of the Web Services framework meant that it was not possible to identifyto a granular level which data would be provisioned for the partner colleges.

5. Develop a mechanism to allow a learner to access or publish their own CV data outside of theShibboleth protection i.e. for self promotion or migration to another PDP system.


6. Explore the mechanisms to digitally sign local qualifications and evidence of learning etc. fromeach institution.

Changes: Due to delays in the project and resourcing conflicts it has not beenpossible to undertake and complete this work at this time.

7. Develop and deliver complete installation instructions of a Shibboleth Identity Provider onWindows.


8. Develop and deliver installation instructions for a Shibboleth Service Provider on Windows.No changes were made to this objective

Based on agreement from the partner colleges to support them to the degree that they could be self-sufficient with respect to Shibboleth in conjunction with feedback from other FE colleges in the Eastmidlands, we extended the objectives relating to Shibboleth to cover the whole end to endimplementation of a Shibboleth framework on windows. This implied a fundamental shift from usingour Shibboleth Installer from the EMSS project which created a black box solution, to a fully

documented, incremental, componentised installation process, with detailed instructions for eachphase. The idea being that this could be taken by anyone with no experience or knowledge ofShibboleth or its dependant technologies and implement a fully functioning IdP.

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Figure 1 - NTU Shibboleth IdP components

From our experience with the information available in the Shibboleth community at large, there was awealth of information on how to implement Shibboleth, however it was very distributed and there wasstill nothing that gave a full and detailed end to end installation instructions to implement an IdP fromthe Windows Operating system upwards, detailing how to install and configure all components.

We plan to continue work on the CV Builder functionality and complete and extend the componentsfor the web services past the formal end of the project. Through the project we have identifiedadditional functionality, features and facilities that we now plan to implement for a version 2.

MethodologyOverall Approach

Within the project there were two core streams of activity CV Builder and Shibboleth, each with theirown approach.

For CV Builder, already having a product in place with all the basic functionality, the original idea wasto extend the system by adding functionality already identified based on existing user feedback, thenbolt-on the changes required to support life long access and integration with the shibbolethframework. With the Shibboleth environment in place between us and our partners we would have abroader test bed for functional evaluation and refinement of the finished product.

For Shibboleth, the planned outputs were to document our knowledge and experience ofimplementing Shibboleth on the windows platform and share this. Specifically take out version of aShibboleth implementation on Windows and work in through with institutions with a comparable ITinfrastructure.

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Rationale for approach

For CV Builder, given the existence of the current product, the extensions and amendments could beimplemented reasonably quickly allowing what we considered to be the added value components ofthe project to commence quickly i.e. the Web Services and Digitally assigning CV assertions etc. Withrespect to Shibboleth, we already had the installer customised from the work done at K.U. Leuven,and we would be able to take this a stage further and use this to support our partners with their

shibboleth implementations. We had the technical staff available with the skill sets necessary toproceed on both fronts in parallel.

Research

In order to determine what currently constituted a CV and to ensure that some we had not excludedsome key details, we sourced as many different CVs, using templates publicly available from privateand public sector organisations, public examples from on-line recruitment agencies, and wherepossible real CVs from colleagues and analysed the contents, structure and layout.

First of all, the sections within the CV were aggregated and we came up with a master list of discretedata sections that was common to all:

Personal Information Address Details Telephone Numbers Email Addresses Websites Training and Education Qualifications Achievements Employment

Career Aims Interests Personal Skills Competencies Research Details Publication Details Institutions

Additional Info Referees

For each data section, we then abstracted the fields within them and worked out which pieces of data

were the most common.

Overview of analysis process:

1. Get all section headers from all CVs note the Header is a section header in its ownright.

2. Create a matrix within a spreadsheet and count the occurrences of the different sectionheaders not making any assumptions at this stage

3. Create a new matrix, identify the core sections from the original matrix and map theoriginal sections to the core

4. For each section, detail the data elements and types required to store the data in arelational format.

5. Map each data element to the corresponding section in ukleap

6. Create initial data model

It was very noticeable, though not unexpected, that the numbers of elements of data required weresubstantially less than what would be expected of a full PDP system. Unfortunately, this meant thatour intentions to map and perhaps provide some additional information to feed back to the UK Leapspecification would not lead to much. Except to say that for each of the sections and data fields therewas a direct map, however the UK Leap specification is considerably more comprehensive.

A good example of this is with Institutions. Most of the data sections included some reference towhere a particular activity took place, however the detail of the where was extremely sparse andusually consisted of just an institution name! To facilitate transitioning the data onwards, we addedInstitutions as a new data section, and defined a minimal set of data (primarily the institutions

address) for it.

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One final observation of the data was that irrespective of the data section concerned, there wasalways a handful of CVs which had a free text element within that section. In a lot of cases this wasused to contextualise the information e.g. for an Email Address, there would be a note to say this wasthe best way of contacting the person etc.

Although contradictory to our philosophy of maintaining the data at the most granular level possible,this did lead to the decision to allow a free text field for each data record.

CV Builder Functional Design

The core principles of the design for the new CV Builder:1. Data - Enter once - reuse many times.2. Data - break data elements into reusable chunks i.e. support better mapping to standards e.g.

UK Leap.3. Multiple different presentations with the same data.4. Specific data selection for specific CV presentations.5. Online (Web Based) publications in addition to hard copy.6. Output of editable hard copy.7. Dual authentication entry points Shibboleth and non-shibboleth.8. Functionality must be intuitive to the end user.

9. Support for Shibboleth Authorisation through the use of eduPersonEntitlement.10. Separation of users identity record from their Login.

The separation of the users identity record within CV Builder from the Login id was the core decisionto allow us to provide facilities for Life long learning. On initial login via Shibboleth, a user is forced topopulate some basic data fields and create what we have described as an Alternative Login account.It is this alternative login account which allows an individual to either join shibboleth accounts as theymove from institution to institution, or enable them access to their data after they have left theeducational environment and no-longer have access to Shibboleth.

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Figure 2 - CV Builder Use Case diagram

CV Builder Technical Design

In order to ensure the best fit to UK Leap, support transitioning of the user data and futureinteroperability; based on our outputs from the RIPPLL project, we needed to ensure that all datastored was recorded to sufficient granular detail to allow us to describe it effectively using XML. Tosupport this, one fundamental design decision was that all data entry elements would be recorded in arelational database, and that all data and output generation would be sourced from the database. Toensure optimum performance, and to reduce vulnerabilities, all data manipulations were performedthrough either a class object referring to a database table, or stored procedures.

Complementing our Shibboleth infrastructure, the development environment for CV Builder was allbased on Microsoft Technologies.

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Windows 2003 Server SQL Server (2000 & 2003) C# .NET ASP primarily for prototyping Internet Information Server (IIS)

At later stages, when it became apparent that CSS on its own would not provide the flexibility we

wanted for the Layout Manager and that we would need to use XML Transformations (XSLT), wedesigned a simple framework, all driven from the database, which allowed us to specify XST chunkswhich could be added together to deliver the formatted output we needed.

In order to provide us with the flexibility to be able to have multiple different presentations of a CV, weneeded to separate Data Entry from Data Selection. We facilitated this by creating a CV DataSelection entity, and managed Layout and Styling as additional discrete processes.

ShibbolethThe strategy adopted in creating appropriate instructions for implementing Shibboleth was to take aclean machine and work through all the steps required to install it. This included documenting asmany problem areas as possible.

From earlier experience, we recognised there was no correct way of implementing Shibboleth andthat key aspects of the implementation were at the discretion of each institution, however rather thanprovide instructions for every option, we opted to clearly articulate what was a Shibboleth IdPrequirement, and what was an NTU decision.

Core NTU Decisions:1. Active Directory for Authentication only2. Shibboleth attributes sourced from MS SQL Server3. JA-SIGs CAS provided the Single Sign-on (SSO) component.

Every other decision was based on the recommended Shibboleth IdP implementation. A key changeto our Shibboleth implementation approach was the entry to the UK Federation and the adoption of itrules of membership, specifically the rule 6.4.1 of the UK Federation Rules of Membership:

6.4.1. credentials of End Users who are no longer members of the organisation must berevoked promptly, or at least no Attributes must be asserted for such End Users to theFederation;

Our original Shibboleth installation sourced attributes from Active Directory, however, we have apractice at NTU that graduates are able to access network resources for example home directoriesetc. for 8 weeks post their official leaving this gives them more time to tidy up things. Rather thanattempt to change university practice, we decided the Active Directory would only provide theAuthentication request, and that we would source the attributes from a SQL Server database. Once astudent completed, we would remove all attributes from the database, hence complying withfederation rules and continuing our service to our students.

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Implementation

The original work packages for the project were developed by the development team in a workshop,the sequencing and parallel running of activities was designed around the resources available at theinitiation of the project. Within the project, there were in effect two completely different tracks, CVBuilder tool itself and the Shibboleth infrastructure to support it.

The split of responsibilities between NTU and our partners left NTU responsible for the coredevelopment both with CV Builder and the implementation of the Shibboleth infrastructure, and ourpartners with several roles.

Proof the Shibboleth installation process and provide testing of the Shibboleth framework forthe web services.

Provide input into data requirements for CV Data. Test CV Builder and Shibboleth access.

Resourcing

At the outset of the project, there were a few losses which had an impact on the start of the project.The lead at West Nottinghamshire College changed this caused a slight delay in getting the wholegroup together. NTU lost the key member of staff who had all the detail knowledge of Shibboleth andthe work on the previous JISC bid. With this context, at the first meeting we discussed and agreedchanging the Shibboleth work to extend it to include full end to end documentation to enable ourpartners to be self-sufficient.

With the loss of our key development resource, the limitations with our previous shibboleth installationapproach became more apparent. Using an Installer to do the work of installing and configuringShibboleth is a very efficient way of getting going quickly, however it did not provide the user with anin depth knowledge of Shibboleth and its pre-requisite technologies. In addition to this our ability tosupport our partners using the installation script was seriously compromised and we needed to closethis knowledge gap.

Shibboleth Support and Documentation

The split of roles within the project meant that in order for out partner colleges to support thedevelopment and testing of both the infrastructure and CV Builder, we needed to reprioritise theactivities around Shibboleth and extend our original remit around Shibboleth.

Although we had lost several months working on the installer, we were confident that we could deliverand we decided the best way to do this was to design an implementation process which workedthrough each component in detail and document each step in turn. We sourced a suitable server andused multiple Windows 2003 VMWare images in a development / test, crash & burn and trainingenvironments.

This documentation was designed as a standalone set of instructions. After internal testing andproofing, we worked with our partners and the East Midlands RSC, hosting a training session at NTUwhere we proofed the materials prior to publication. An interesting observation from the training is thatgiven the detail level the creators of the training materials were working at, they fell into the same trapas other existing materials and closer to the end of the documentation started to assume knowledgeand information that had not been provided.

The loss of staff at NTU also meant that where we had been able to run the two streams as parallelactivities, it was no-longer possible to do so, and we had to start to sequence the activities morebased on our resource constraints.

The documentation referred to in this section is available on our project Wiki space.

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CV Builder Development

When we managed to start work on the CV Builder tool itself four months into the project, weidentified that the separation of the login name from the users internal identity and the enhancementsto make the data model more granular, implied that the existing data model for the current systemcould not be extended. With this in mind we decided to create a new product from scratch, and shiftedour database design and development approach to a more agile model. Rather than design the whole

data model first then build the forms, we designed each functional area based on the CV Builder usecase diagram (See Figure 2).

Unfortunately, having to go back to basics and redesign from scratch meant that we missed thewindow of opportunity to make the new CV Builder available ready for the NTU internal users. Withhindsight, this proved to be a blessing in disguise. Our original intent for the output format was to useCSS, to control the layout and design of the CV, when we finally got to the layout manager phase anddesigning, it failed its usability tests and we found that although we could get CSS to happily layoutthe page and style it, it was not possible to use CSS on its own to allow on-line interactive templatemanagement.

The CV Builder works on the sequence:

Figure 3 - CV Builder process flow

The requirement for static fixed format output i.e. the PDF output reduced considerably as usersstarted to work with the tool. The main rationale for this is that despite the flexibility offered by thelayout manager, users still wanted to tweak the layout of a hard copy version. Unfortunately as thelayout manager components were the last component to be developed, we short-cut the developmentprocess and provided quick solution to download a html file as a .doc rather than a native .DOC or .rtffile. We hope to get back to this part and put a more robust rtf / doc generator in place.

Organisational issues

Through the life of the project, Information Systems have been implementing a step change in how wework. Although each change has led to an incremental improvement in both organisational andenvironmental conditions, there has been a noticeable impact on the delivery and organisation of theproject. In addition to this, during this same period, NTU embarked on a project to replace its existingin-house developed Virtual Learning Portal (VLP) with a commercial Virtual Learning Environment(VLE) purchased from Desire2Learn (D2L).

With the reorganisational changes, NTU Information Systems adopted a policy of formal resourcemanagement for all projects involving IS. The resources required to support the evaluation andimplementation of the new VLE were, unfortunately, the same resources that managed andmaintained the incumbent VLP. This led to some very interesting discussions regarding resourceprioritisation, one of the prime impacts was as we had designed the project and distributed the

workload across a longer period it was easy for IS project managers outside the project to open theirresource negotiation with statements like Your project runs for another year, I only need the resourcefor a few days, surely you can catch up a couple of days over the next year or so.

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Given this and given the new internal structures in IS, it was necessary to restructure how resourceswere allocated to the project i.e. giving them longer chunks of consecutive time over wider gaps.Unfortunately this plan restructuring did not happen immediately and the conflict between the originalorganisation of the project and the new way of managing resources lead to interruption in the timeallocated to the CV Builder aspect of the project and consequent delay in the development of the CVBuilder.

Project ManagementThe original project plan included the project manager with a design and development role, throughthe project, with the other organisational changes underway, this proved to be a poor decision. Thekey area to suffer was around the formal project communications, and communications to the widerprogramme group, this was not identified as an issue until late in the project where very little could bedone to fully recover the situation.

We have recognised this internally within IS and have made appropriate structural changes to ensurethat this will not affect other projects.

Outputs and ResultsThe substantive outputs from the project include the new CV Builder tool for use within NTU. This willbe released to the wider community as an open source product at a launch being organised forOctober 2008. In addition, this tool will be offered as an on-line service to institutions who aremembers of the UK Federation in the East Midlands once our partners have signed off on itssuitability.

At the launch, all the development notes, design materials, source code and installation instructionswill be published within the project Wiki. We will not be managing the CV Builder as a collaborativeopen source project as we have internal drivers and needs to be met specifically exploring closerintegration with the D2L e-Portfolio tool. However we will be continuing our work in this area andsharing our findings. We have no issues with anyone else picking up this code and continuing thedevelopment in a more collaborative way.

One minor snag with respect to the service, is that informal feedback from presentations to FEColleges at the various RSC events attended was if the full functionality is going to be available asopen source, why would I go through the extra formal hoops to sign up to an external service when Ican, more easily implement and host it for our own students. At this point, interest in the hostedservice is considerably less than interest in getting the source code!

We are finalising the service cost, at the moment, as we do not store any physical artifacts i.e.Images, Word Documents, media files etc. but reference them via a web link, the storage requirementper user is very low we have not agreed as yet whether to make the cost for an institution accessingthe service a nominal low fee, or wave the costs altogether.

Feedback from our Careers team confirmed that the additional functionality did meet and close the

functionality gaps.With respect to Shibboleth, we created and published full documentation on an end to endimplementation on the Windows platform. This is currently available in our project Wiki.

In addition to the planned Shibboleth on Windows work, we also used Linux VMWare images toprototype various Shibboleth configurations and deployments, the outcomes and instructions for thiswork has also been published in the Wiki.

Lesser outputs include some of the design and technical components of the CV Builder itself. Thisincludes the data model and design, the database driven XML, XSLT and CSS generators etc.

Primary dissemination activities concentrated on local FE colleges through the East Midlands and

Eastern RSCs. The outcome from the JISC Eduserv discussion around on-going Athens provision,raised the emphasis on Shibboleth and we were asked to provide more details and present theShibboleth aspects of the project.

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The outcome of the CV analysis was slightly disappointing with respect to UK Leap. The CV Dataappeared to be more a subset of UK Leap than originally anticipated, although this to a degree ratifiesthe UK Leap specification, it did not enable us to provide more useful feedback.

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Outcomes

Project achievements against aims and objectives set

Aim Evaluation

The primary aim of the project is to develop, buildand deploy a service which will enable anylearner with a Shibboleth account in the EastMidlands area to create dynamic CV. The hope isthat this will demonstrate how the UK Federationand the Shibboleth infrastructure can enableinstitutions, over and above just replacingAthens.

The overall aim has not changed, however thedeployment of the Service has been delayedpending successful final testing and completion ofsome contractual documentation it isanticipated that this work will be completed beforeChristmas 2008.Apart from that, all the other work supporting thisis complete and we believe we have created agood product and good demonstrator as aShibboleth enabled service.

One concern, given that the CV Builder will bereleased as open source, there is a risk that theservice will not be utilised as institutions will beable to create their own copy.

The secondary aim of the project was to providesupport for the installation and configuration of asuitable Shibboleth environment with both ourpartner colleges with the provision of appropriatelearning materials and documentation to allowother institutions with little or no knowledge of thetechnologies supporting Shibboleth to implementtheir own environments.

Given the change in emphasis at the start of theproject in the Shibboleth sections, we are verypleased with the outcomes here. We have hadexcellent positive feedback from users who havetaken our instructions and implemented their ownenvironments.

Satisfaction of objectives

Objective Evaluation

Develop a CV Builder data repository where thelearner can store all the components required tobuild a CV in a relational database withappropriate web based data entry andmanagement screens.

Completed although the first version failedusability tests, we are confident that the newversion is a superior product. Once signed offinternally, and we complete the helpdocumentation, we will be releasing a version 1to the wider community.

We have been very pleased with the workeventually delivered here. We already have a listof things we want to add for a version 2 and willbe continuing with this work past the end of the

project.Implement Shibboleth IdP at partner institutionswhere it does not already exist so that membersof each partner institution can access the CVBuilder.

Completed. This was one aspect of the projectwhere we did not anticipate any issues. Althoughloss of staff did impact on the delivery dates forthis, we believe we have provided a morecomprehensive set of instructions and informationwhich is of more use to the wider community thanthe original documentation would have been.

Develop a framework to allow remote learnerdata to be referenced by the CV Builder serviceusing Web Services protected by a ShibbolethSP at each partner institution.

The framework has been developed, however wehave not managed to proceed past this andactually implement it in a production system.

This is one of the internal NTU priorities and we

intend to progress this work with our partnerspast the end of the project and publish our work.

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Identify local learner data (where the data alreadyexists) that can be referenced by the CV Builderservice. Where possible, these basic PDPcomponents required to build a CV will be madeavailable via web services from each partnerinstitution.

This has been completed. The data sets that areavailable are quite minimal, primarily identity,personal details and some qualifications. One keyarea that will be of immediate use is in enablingthe population of the Personal Details sections.

Once we get the web services framework moved

to a production environment we expect to be ableto further refine this section. In addition to this,NTU will be exploring how we can better integratewith our new VLE.

Develop a mechanism to allow a learner toaccess or publish their own CV data outside ofthe Shibboleth protection i.e. for self promotion ormigration to another PDP system.

This is completed, we currently have the situationat Nottingham Trent where we have implementeda new VLE from Desire2Learn. This VLE comeswith its own ePortfolio tool, and we intend onexploring how we can integrate either the D2LTool with CV Builder or Vice Versa,

Explore the mechanisms to digitally sign localqualifications and evidence of learning etc. fromeach institution.

Unfortunately, given the delays with the projectthis is one of the areas where we have not beenable to apply sufficient effort to. This is a

disappointment internally, and we are optimisticthat we will be able to continue exploring in thisare and feed back our findings to the community.

Develop and deliver complete installationinstructions of a Shibboleth Identity Provider onWindows.

Completed very satisfactorily, using the Wikiformat has enabled us to update and maintainthis documentation as and when changes occur.

Develop and deliver installation instructions for aShibboleth Service Provider on Windows.

Completed. Although available, we feel there ismore that can be added here.

Who benefits?

Students and Staff at NTU get the immediate benefit of an improved CV Builder service. NTU has strengthened its working relationship with partners and the local RSCs, enabling

better collaboration and sharing of knowledge and experiences. Partner colleges will get similar benefits once we release the service as a production service

and they begin accessing. Institutions in the East Midlands will directly benefit from either the central service or the

release of the CV Builder tool as open source. Life Long learners will be able to easily take their data away, or if they want, they can retain

access to it for the life of their account. Institutions who are attempting to implement a Shibboleth infrastructure on windows will be

able to work through the online materials.

Lessons Learned

A two year development project is too long unless you have full time dedicated resources. Mypersonal preference would be to work on shorter duration projects. Only undertake a research or new development project with dedicated resource. Maintain communications with the larger JISC programme. Due to a simple error early on in

the project, programme communications and information were not being received. As a resultthere was a communications failure with the programme manager, and consequentlydeadlines missed and unnecessary rushing around to play catch up ensued. (The JISCprogramme manager, David Kernohan, was very supportive with this.)

Continually revisit the project plan and update work packages. With the changes in internal ISprocessing, specifically bringing in formal resource planning across the department, and nothaving full-time dedicated project resources, juggling resources and negotiating resourceavailability can be frustrating. With a current, up-to-date project plan and work packages, youcan better argue the case for resource commitment.

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As far as possible, keep the primary aims as closely aligned as possible, we found that wehad effectively two discrete projects, and combined with loss of key resource we were unableto satisfactorily keep both strands running in parallel.

ConclusionsWe found the project to be extremely beneficial in many respects:

We closed what we perceived as a gap in the community with respect to Shibbolethimplementations on Windows.

The CV Builder, despite being delivered later than planned, is a better product than existedbefore.

Although the changes within NTU IS organisation initially had a detrimental impact on theproject, the new way of allocating resources in discrete chunks, effectively implementing asplit between development and production support, proved to better support the resource anddevelopment approaches required for this type of activity.

We have a stronger working relationship with local FE Colleges, in particular with both ourpartners. When one of our partners identified a problem with our implementation of CASsLDAP lookup to Active Directory with sub-domains, we were able to work very closelytogether to identify the best solution.

Although we will not be managing the CV Builder as an operational open-source project, we

will be continuing the work in this area and will continue publishing our enhancements.

ImplicationsWith respect to CV Builder, we feel we have now a solid product, and potentially a exampledevelopment framework for others to be able to start to develop and deliver shared services viaShibboleth and the UK Federation.

As part of the feedback for CV Builder, we have received comments that as all the data is stored in adatabase, given the simple data entry and data selection screens, providing a mechanism to directlylink Skills to Employment, or Employment to Qualifications etc, would provide a good building blockfor an e-Portfolio system. We were very careful to keep the scope of the CV Builder to just CVs,however the relational database and application design could theoretically be extended to facilitate

the creation of a simple e-Portfolio system. We do not intend to proceed along this vein ourselves asstrategically we will be concentrating on integrating the CV Builder with the e-Portfolio tool within ournew VLE.

Developing an application and using Shibboleth as both the Authentication and Authorisationcomponent as very straight forward, once you have a working Shibboleth infrastructure. We wouldexpect that over the next 12 months, as the prioritisation of implementing Shibboleth to replaceAthens authentication reduces, institutions will begin to explore the many benefits and possibilities ofa federated access framework.

References

EMSS Final report (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/accessmanagement/eastmidlandsfr.pdf)JA-SIG CAS Open source enterprise single sign on (http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/)RIPPLL Homepage for the RIPPLL project (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/rippll/)Shibboleth Shibboleth @Internet 2 (https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/SHIB/WebHome)UK Federation UK Access Management Federation (http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/)UKLeap UK lifelong learner information profile Specification BS Draft standard 8788-3:2006

For clarity, please note that all references to Shibboleth relate to version 1, and not Shibboleth 2.

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http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/accessmanagement/eastmidlandsfr.pdfhttp://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/rippll/https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/SHIB/WebHomehttp://www.ukfederation.org.uk/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/accessmanagement/eastmidlandsfr.pdfhttp://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/rippll/https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/SHIB/WebHomehttp://www.ukfederation.org.uk/


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Appendixes

AcronymsASP Microsofts Active Server PagesCAS Enterprise Single Sign-on service provided by JA-SIGD2L Desire2Learn

EMSS East Midlands Shibboleth ServiceIIS Microsofts Internet Information Server IdP Shibboleth Identity Provider NCN New College NottinghamNTU Nottingham Trent UniversityRIPPLL Regional Interoperability Project on Progression for Lifelong LearningRSC Regional Support CentreRTF Rich text format output file formatSP Shibboleth Service Provider UKLeap UK Lifelong learner information profileVLE Virtual Learning EnvironmentVLP Virtual Learning Portal NTUs in-house developed learning environment.WNC West Nottinghamshire CollegeXML Extensible Markup LanguageXSLT Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations

Cv Builder Final Report

Documents

Transcript of Cv Builder Final Report