Professors, staff members, and information-technology officials at all sorts of colleges share one vision of utopia: a campus with single sign-on. It’s the idea that a person needs only one user name and password combination, or one set of credentials, to access every digital service an institution provides. A number of institutions, reaching for that utopia, have joined a nonprofit group called InCommon, founded in 2005. UMBC joined three years ago, once Microsoft’s Dreamspark and Apple’s iTunes U did. Jack Suess, the university’s chief information officer, said that before UMBC joined InCommon, it had to negotiate with every outside service provider about how to integrate its system individually. That effort seemed worthwhile until the partners they were waiting for joined up. Now, he said, "I don’t have to reinvent the wheel with each vendor."
The article, “Chasing the Single-Password Dream,” ran in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Thursday, May 6.
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