Unicon Announces New Cooperative Support Program for Jasig's CAS (Central Authentication Service)
Jasig Spring 2009 - Dallas, TX - March 2, 2009 —Unicon, Inc., the leading provider of open source software consulting services for the education market, today announced a new Open Source Cooperative Support Program for the Jasig Central Authentication Service (CAS). CAS is a secure authentication system and single sign-on service for enterprise applications and platforms and provides a trusted way for an application to authenticate a user. Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program provides member institutions with a predictable cost support solution for their open source solutions for uPortal, Sakai, and now CAS, along with a dedicated team of expert development and technical support specialists for direct technical support and assistance. All development work and fixes performed by the team for individual institutions are contributed back and shared with the CAS community.
Unicon has a full range of service offerings for institutions wishing to deploy Jasig’s CAS including: planning, installation, configuration, implementation, custom development, application and system integration, branding, and training. Unicon can implement and customize CAS for uPortal, Sakai, and other enterprise applications. For more information on Unicon’s complete service for CAS, visit: http://www.unicon.net/services/cas.
"Jasig is very pleased to see a Unicon service offering for CAS," said Jonathan Markow, Executive Director of Jasig. "Unicon has been a contributor to the CAS project for a number of years, and they have broad experience implementing CAS at higher education institutions. The Unicon Cooperative Support Program has been important to many uPortal institutions. The availability of a similar, high quality, commercial service for CAS should be just as well received."
“We added CAS to our cooperative support program as a response to the increased demand for CAS at higher ed institutions and strong acceptance of our innovative support model for open source projects,” said John C. Blakley, CEO of Unicon, Inc. “Unicon’s professional services team has successfully deployed and integrated CAS with numerous enterprise applications over the past few years and we’re excited to begin offering it as part of our support program.”
Since 1999, Unicon’s consulting group has provided over 175 colleges and universities with software consulting, support, and related services for their online campus deployments. Unicon has also made significant development, technology, and feature contributions to the uPortal platform and community.
Partial List of Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program Members:
uPortal: Brooklyn College- City University of New York, South Dakota State University, and University of Georgia
Sakai: New Teacher Center, University of Virginia, and University of the Arts
About CAS
The Jasig Central Authentication Service, originally developed by Yale University, provides secure user authentication and single sign-on for many client programs that have been “CASified” since CAS became available. Single sign-on is a session/user authentication process that allows a user to provide his or her credentials once in order to access multiple applications. The single sign-on authenticates the user to access all the applications he or she has been authorized to access. It eliminates future authentication requests when the user switches applications during that particular session. Web Single sign-on works strictly with applications accessed with a web browser. The request to access a web resource is intercepted either by a component in the web server, or by the application itself. Unauthenticated users are diverted to an authentication service and returned only after a successful authentication. More information about CAS is available at: http://www.jasig.org/cas.
About Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program
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. Support issues are managed on a priority basis with guaranteed service level agreements and an escalation mechanism top priority issues. All development work performed by the team will be done in direct participation with the open source Jasig CAS community. The Cooperative Support Program for CAS is a strong complement to Unicon’s other technology delivery services for uPortal and other applications which include various bundles comprised of project planning, software engineering, implementation, branding, and training components. More information is available at: http://www.unicon.net/support/cooperative.
