Getting production ready

Where the previous pages covered getting your applications set up and functional, this page covers the general considerations and requirements you will want to do or consider before going live in the OpenAthens federation.

Check all the information on the various tabs of your application is production ready

• The Name, Logo and optional information URL should all be approved by your marketing or product management guys. See also: What makes a good resource description
• You have a general access URL that will get authenticated users in the front door and the redirector function is configured. See: Access URLs
• Your discovery service is user-friendly. See: Discovery
• You have added any required or optional attribute information
• For Keystone, have you added a link to your privacy policy?
• You have included details on your preferred activation method

External applications: confirm metadata has been added to your SP

• During testing and approval, use the OpenAthens test federation metadata: https://fed.openathens.net/oafedtest/metadata
• Once tests have passed, use the live OpenAthens federation metadata: http://fed.openathens.net/oafed/metadata

Confirm you can access your service with an OpenAthens account from your own domain

See also: Test IdPs

Re-check compliance

For all applications: review against our best practices and technical recommendations.

If you are joining other federations, review against the similar documents published by them. 

Keystone applications: enable any federations you are a member of in the associated connection

This is done on the associated connection of the application. Access the relevant connection either from the connections menu or the link in the application and scroll down to the identity providers section at the bottom where there are switches for each federation.

• Definitely do the OpenAthens federation (says 'Allow sign-in for live OpenAthens identity providers'). This is also what makes the option to go live available (you do not need to do this if this will be on an internal resource - e.g. a locally hosted VLE).
• Enabling the federations makes their metadata available to the application once you've saved. It does not actually add you to that federation - you'll still need to join and register or update your entity there according to that federation's methods.
• Changes take less than five minutes to go live

See also: How to join other federations

Set it as live

• This triggers some manual tests by our team. If all goes well this won't usually take long but because testing can throw up problems it is best to allow some time for it in your project plan. To minimise delays:
  • enable access within your application for our test accounts before setting it as live.
  • let our team know a few days in advance
• Once approved it will be live and operational in the federation within 15 minutes. Some places where data is displayed may take up to 8 hours.
• You can then authorise access for your subscribers.
• If you used the sd.openathens.net test accounts during development, remember to limit or remove access as that is available to all publishers to use.