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Having a service being part of eduGAIN has advantages for all involved parties, the users, the operators and the participating organisations. Some of these benefits are listed on the page Benefits of eduGAIN. (page not found)
As publisher, having your service in eduGAIN has the main advantage that the service might not have to be registered with additional individual federations anymore. In order to allow users to access a service, so far publishers had to join each national identity federation individually. Each federation had its own (similar) rules and processes to legally and technically join the federation. This caused quite some overhead on all involved sides. That was not a one-time overhead but a recurring one because if for example the service’s certificate changed, this change had to be announced and propagated to each federation a publisher’s service was member of. In some cases, publisher services are registered in more than 20 national identity federations. Thanks to eduGAIN, it might be possible to be registered only in one single federation but still reach most users from all eduGAIN member federations.
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If your service is part not of eduGAIN yet or not federated at all, we recommend you to first follow the guide How _ to _ Join _ eduGAIN _ as _ Service _ Provider, which explains step by step how to federate a service and add it to eduGAIN.
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If too few of your customers are in eduGAIN yet, it might be still better to joining individual federations, though this is not recommended in the long term. If only few of your potential customers are not in eduGAIN yet, the process for them to join eduGAIN could be speed up if you inform edugain-integration@geant.net about support@edugain.org about the organisations that would be interested in your service but that are not ready yet for eduGAIN.
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In order to allow users from Identity Providers (IdP) to login and use your service, you might need to adapt your IdP Discovery Service (i.e. the service that lets a user choose from which organisation he is from). If the tool presenting the list of organisation IdPs is limited to only few federations, specific IdPs or if your service does not have a Discovery Service at all, you can have a look at chapter E. (“Use a Discovery Service that supports Interfederation”) of How _ to _ offer _ a _ service _ in _ eduGAIN.
Step 4: Inform existing Customers about eduGAIN Access
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