PerMIT drivers
MIT is the sole developer and user of the current RolesDB system developed over 10 years ago. There are not many Authority systems in the Universe. The driver of this project is to create an open source version of RolesDB and a community to develop and support it further such that MIT is no longer the sole developer and user of the system.
perMIT benefits
The perMIT system will be a contribution to the open source community, a seminal effort towards the evolution of Identity Services for MIT and the global effort towards more mature identity management capabilities. This will support better integration of authorization management into a wide range of applications as the community helps to develop integration solutions around perMIT and addresses the IS&T strategic goal of Improving the IT User Experience. Additionally, the perMIT project will help to address the IS&T strategic goal of Provide high quality, ubiquitous IT services by addressing the component of Creating a "service oriented architecture" and infrastructure platform that software developers across MIT can easily use to develop and maintain flexible IT applications at lower cost.
The perMIT system will also be of direct benfit to MIT. It is expected to provide a well defined service interface to authorization management, facillitating loosely coupled applications that are not tightly bound to a specific database product or schema. Unlike the current Roles system perMIT will provide an authorization management system that can be used to support applications that are aware of federated authentication. The system must be able to represent authorizations where the community is broader than one simply defined by people having an MIT Kerberos principal. The perMIT system is also intending to support Create a system that provides high availability and failover deployment scenarios.
perMIT scope
This work will involve translating from Oracle DB technology to MySQL and appropriate APIs to provide the same functionality of what MIT now enjoys; and extend this capability to include web services, support for bulk loading of data from external services and a certified Kuali Student authorization interface. The perMIT project will also provide a base user interface to essentially demonstrate the utility of the system but not be a reference UI nor a complete demonstration of features of perMIT. The community is expected to handle UI development going forward.