Vice Provost Bruno Forms New Middleware Team

In a continuing effort to identify, develop, and add new elements to the campus? information technology infrastructure, John Bruno, Vice Provost for Information and Educational Technology (IET), recently formed a new middleware team. The team is made up of existing IET programmers, developers, and other specialists who have been grouped together under the leadership of Tom Arons, IET's Infrastructure Architect.

The team will work with a variety of campus units and groups to develop solutions for meeting the campus? long- and short-term middleware needs. One such group is the Technology Infrastructure Forum (TIF), co-chaired by Minh Nguyen and Dale Snapp, and comprised of technology leads from each college and school. Also involved in the Middleware Team's ongoing consultative process is the TIF's Security and Client Support Issues Subcommittees .
In addition, UC Davis is a member of Internet 2, a research and development consortium of universities and industry partners working on various initiatives to develop and provide advanced network applications and technologies. The Middleware Team will participate in one of those initiatives, the Internet 2 Middleware Initiative, whose primary goal is to promote standardization and interoperability of middleware services such as authentication, authorization, identification, directories, and security.

The Middleware Team has already made several middleware services available to the campus. Those include the LDAP directory service, DistAuth (distributed authentication service , an extended account service , and an account provisioning service. At their most basic lev el, these services allow Web administrators to better tailor user access to specific Web services, often providing an added layer of security and efficiency between campus systems and applications.

The team continues to tackle other middleware needs, based on campus requests, goals, and input. One of the team's current projects is the development of a roles database, which is featured on the list of proposed Information Technology Projects for the campus for 2003-05 and on the UC Davis Information Technology Strategic Plan.

To find out more about middleware services already available, to read recent announcements, and to access technical documentation as well as descriptions of projects under development, visit the Middleware Web site. The Middleware Team welcomes questions and feedback. To contact the team, use the brief feedback form on the Web site or send email to middleware@ucdavis.edu.