Sakai OAE Deployment and Management

Chapter 5. LDAP Integration

Sakai OAE is effective on its own, but it also functions as one element in a campus technology ecosystem. The first step in integrating OAE with other services on campus is setting it up for your school’s authentication and authorization environment. Authentication and authorization integration bring OAE into the university fold. Though OAE provides an authentication subsystem, one of your first goals should be to hook accounts up with central services. This is less exciting from the OAE alone perspective. It gets very exciting when you hook up an OAE widget to another university system. Like magic both systems share a list of users, because they’re both looking to the same authoritative university source.

This chapter takes you through the process of integrating OAE to a very small, very local open source LDAP installation. This toy integration will give you a handle on how account and authentication management works in the OAE context. Once you’ve mastered this, you can negotiate meaningfully with your LDAP administrator on how best to roll university authentication into OAE.

While single sign on systems are not directly addressed in this chapter, several have been written, including a CAS integration at University of California, Berkeley, and an OpenSSO integration at New York University. The principles of authentication integration are similar. Working through the LDAP integration can provide a launching pad for other authentication work.

These examples ...