OpenAthens SP end of life notice
From the email sent on 2 April 2019:
I am writing to notify you that the end-of-life date for OpenAthens SP 2.x service provider software is Friday 29 May 2020. We are contacting you because you are registered as a technical contact for the application registered in the OpenAthens publisher dashboard:
If you no longer have day-to-day responsibilities for your company’s products being made available via the OpenAthens Federation, the UK Access Management Federation or any other access management federation, please forward this email to the relevant colleagues with a request for immediate action.
OpenAthens SP v2.x end-of-life notice
The OpenAthens SP v2.0 software was initially released in 2011, and superseded by OpenAthens Keystone in 2017. In order to better control the overheads around updates, bug fixes and changes in operational practice of 20+ federations, the end-of-life date for OpenAthens SP 2.x service provider software is Friday 29 May 2020.
What this means in practical terms is:
- 1 June 2019: no further software updates or bug fixes will be available for OpenAthens SP 2.x;
- 1 July 2019: customers won’t be able to get support if something goes wrong with the OpenAthens SP v2.x software. The standard response will be that the only option is to implement OpenAthens Keystone;
- the software will stop working sometime after 29 May 2020 but there will be no further communication on this timing. You should treat 29 May 2020 as the final date.
Next steps
The OpenAthens Service Desk will be in touch to schedule a technical call to talk you through replacing OpenAthens SP v2 with OpenAthens Keystone. This newer software uses OpenID Connect (OIDC) as the relying party; this is a lightweight technology used by PayPal and Google to handle secure single sign-on. We use OIDC to pass the values in SAML attributes to a publisher’s platform and this makes it much easier to implement than other SAML service provider software.
Here are some high-level articles which should be reviewed ahead of the technical call:
Let us know if you have any questions.
Regards,
Legacy OpenAthens SP documentation will remain available until June 2020