Authorisation and policing of Xerte Online Toolkit

Hi everyone,

As some of you may be aware, I lead a small Xerte project at University of Edinburgh(UoE) that needs to provide a business case for Xerte becoming a centrally supported service for the whole institution. I would like to gain insight to how other institutions (FE/HE) have managed the authorisation of Xerte and "policing" of Xerte content.

At the moment I need to manually add a new user's username via the Xerte management panel. Once this has been done the user can then log in using our SSO authentication (CoSign). We do not have Xerte configured to allow automatic authorisation that would allow a new user (who hasn't been added via the management panel) to sign-in with their University credentials to gain access to the Xerte workspace. So my questions are:

Q1. Does your institution allow anyone with appropriate credentials to log into your Xerte service without any vetting?
Q2. If you do allow for automatic authentication and authorisation, how do you manage the scalability and capacity of your Xerte service? (we have over 35,000 user accounts).
Q3.How do you "police" the content that users create to ensure malicious or inappropriate content is not being published? Is a terms of use enough?

Many thanks in advance,
Alison

Hi Alison

1. Yes, we use ldap authentication so anyone with a university of nottingham account (staff & students) can login and start creating projects

2. This generally hasn't been a huge issue (and we have 20,000+ projects now!) We occasionally get notified that we are getting close to filling our server space but have always managed to just get extra space allocated as far as I know. The only exception to this was when a group created a project containing several large video files and then duplicated it several hundred times and took up a huge amount of space very quickly. We then needed to work with them to get a better solution than having multiple versions of the media out there.

3. We don't do any policing of content.

Hi Fay,

Thanks for responding. My previous institution used LDAP authentication and we had no problems. How many user accounts do you have approximately at Nottingham?

Would be good to hear from Durham, Cardiff, Swansea.


many thanks,
Alison