Our simplest solution allows a librarian in a small team to manage their own usernames and passwords in our hosted managed directory. After a few steps single sign on can be established to library collections for end-users and patrons. But larger organisations and institutions have professional teams managing user directories and access rights across their applications. OpenAthens is designed to work with these systems and directories.
If your organisation already has a user-directory storing user account and usernames and passwords, OpenAthens is able to connect securely with this data. We have a number of options available for establishing this connection, either using commonly available connectors with SAML services such as ADFS and LDAP or using our API to pass information. With these tools and our detailed documentation single sign-on is easily established along with the benefits the OpenAthens administrative area.
Many organisations have set up their own instances of platforms and applications that have SAML access management protocols built into the system. Because of our long-standing relationship with academia in the UK, historically the applications we encounter are VLEs (virtual learning environments) like Moodle or Blackboard. Our software allows organisations to establish a single sign-on session that will include these individual apps, including Google Apps.