pdurbin
commented
8 years ago There's also the opposite problem (and maybe should be in yet another issue). We got a report in https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=241588 that UC Davis shows up in the list (because they're part of R&S) get the user got "given name was null" when attempting to log in. This should never happen because all Identity Providers (IdPs) that are part of R&S are supposed to release the "Research & Scholarship Attribute Bundle" per https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/InCFederation/Research+and+Scholarship+Attribute+Bundle
mheppler
kcondon
If you go to Sign Up ( https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverseuser.xhtml?editMode=CREATE&redirectPage=%2Fdataverse.xhtml ) you'll see at the top "Want to create your account through your institution? Log In here." You click and see long list (over 200 institutions) and "Select your institution and click "Continue" to log in via your institution's authentication system... Use Dataverse with your institutional log in instead of creating an account. Learn More." When you click "Learn More" it says "Institutional log in allows you to use your log in information for your university (e.g. HarvardKey at Harvard) to log into your Dataverse account. By using your institutional log in, you won’t have to remember your password for Dataverse or manage another account."
This is a dead end. We should add something like "if your institution is not on the list, contact your IT department to see if your institution is part of the Research & Scholarship (R&S) category of the InCommon federation".
The way the fix was described by @nmedeiro at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/dataverse-community/txP-gHrpXGA/zV3ztgNaAAAJ was this:
"We've been using Harvard's hosted Dataverse for few years, and our users had to create separate accounts to log in. Once Shibboleth was enabled on Dataverse, I worked with Phil and Haverford's identity staff to have us added to the Research & Scholarship category of InCommon. Now our users can take advantage of single sign-on with their college credentials, which is much more convenient for them."
(For more details on what Research & Scholarship is, see http://guides.dataverse.org/en/4.5.1/installation/shibboleth.html#identity-federation and for an even deeper dive, see #2937.)
For a real-world example of the confusion, see https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=242595#txn-4859135 . The work around, of course, is to create a local account.
Reducing the friction to creating an account will help with our number one goal of "increase adoption (users, dataverses, datasets, installations, journals)" at http://dataverse.org/goals-roadmap-and-releases and this doc change is very low hanging fruit.