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Folks, As many of you know we have a beta implementation of the Shibboleth Identity Provider (IdP) available for use. You also may have heard about Bill Gates' recent announcement about Microsoft Dreamspark: http://blogs.msdn.com/gautam/archive/2008/02/19/dreamspark-free-microsoft-developer-tools-for-all-students.aspx In a nutshell this initiative by our buddies in Redmond lets students download their developer tools and use them free of charge. Microsoft's quandary was (and is, to a degree) that they don't have a good way to verify a person's "studentness" easily. Well, the Shibboleth technology that we've deployed, and the InCommon Federation for Higher Education, which we joined last year, allows this to happen. We can authenticate students locally, and assert their affiliation (student, in this case) to the Dreamspark download application so that Microsoft can provide the software to folks who we say are students. Microsoft has decided to allow anyone who authenticates through an InCommon IdP to be allowed to download the software. I'm not sure when they'll change this policy to strictly require student affiliation to come from the IdP, but we're ready for such an event. In the meantime, my understanding is that it will be downloadable by anyone successfully authenticated by our IdP, though the license only allows students to use the software for free. Another weird Microsoficity is that you must have or obtain a Windows LiveID to download the software. THe LiveID is free, and fairly easy to setup. This is a great real life example of Shibboleth at work, and I'm very excited to be in the first group of schools to offer this service. The download URL is here, and I would encourage you to direct students who are interested to it: https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/ ./mk -- Matt Kolb <[log in to unmask]> Academic Computing & Network Services Michigan State University