Unicon Contributes Software Enhancements to Jasig’s Central Authentication Service (CAS)

Single Sign-On Improvements Provided by Unicon’s Innovative Commercial Support Program

Phoenix, AZ – January 12, 2011 — Unicon, Inc., a leading IT consulting services provider specializing in open source for the education market, today announced the availability of new enhancements for Jasig's Central Authentication Service.  Throughout the fourth quarter of 2010, the company worked directly with the Jasig product development process and accomplished significant updates, corrections of security vulnerabilities, and bug fixes in releases of the CAS server and client software library.  Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program for CAS made these contributions through the Cooperative Development arm of the program.  The Cooperative Support Program provides member institutions with tier-free SLA-driven technical support from qualified software developers and systems administrators.  All development work and fixes performed by the team for individual institutions are contributed back and shared with the open source community.

Subscribers in Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program voted on CAS public project tracker JIRA issues they felt required the most attention from the Unicon development team.  The subscriber voting process influenced the CAS software enhancements contributed back to the community.

Cooperative Support for CAS:  Accomplishments and Highlights     

 About Jasig CAS

The Jasig Central Authentication Service software, originally developed by Yale University, implements secure user authentication and single sign-on for web applications and is widely adopted in higher education.  Single sign-on allows a user to provide their credentials only once to access multiple applications, improving user convenience and limiting the exposure of the end user's password.  The CAS server software and many client libraries, including those described in this press release, are free and open source software available from Jasig.  More information about CAS is available at: http://www.jasig.org/cas.

About Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program

Cooperative Support for CAS is a commercial support program featuring direct access to qualified technical staff, under four SLAs ranging from “Developer” (for those just getting started with CAS) to “Dedicated” (for those seeking unlimited 24x7 support).  Participation in the program requires an annual subscription fee that enables institutions to access the support services and also funds a dedicated support and development team.  All development work performed by the team will be done in direct participation with the open source communities.  Cooperative Support is available for CAS, uPortal, Sakai, and Shibboleth, with discounts available to subscribers needing support for multiple open source software products.  To learn more about Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program, visit http://www.unicon.net/support/cooperative.

Unicon is a CAS Solution Provider and Jasig Partner

Unicon is an official Jasig partner and authorized Solution Provider for both CAS and uPortal.  Currently, John Lewis, the Chief Software Architect at Unicon, is on the Jasig Board of Directors.   Jasig is a consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates sponsoring open source software projects for higher education, fostering collaboration within and among communities of practice.  Jasig is a non-profit 501(c)3 membership organization organizing conferences in support of open source software design, development, and implementation.  Jasig provides hosting and representation for several open source projects including uPortal and Central Authentication Service (CAS).

Learn more about CAS.

Learn more about uPortal.