Facilitating Collaboration

The Catalyst Web Tools are designed to support Web-based communication and collaboration for the University of Washington community. In order to facilitate cross-university collaboration and communication with individuals not affiliated with the UW, our login system allows people to access Catalyst tools with a free ProtectNetwork ID.

"Catalyst Tools Login" page

Catalyst tools login process begins with a "where are you from" page (WAYF) that allows you to select your Identity Provider. For the time being, your choices of Identity Providers are the University of Washington and ProtectNetwork, but in the future other universities will also be included. If you are working with faculty, students, or researchers at other universities and you would like them to be able to login with the ID that they use at their own institution, please let us know. We will contact the technology staff at their institution to facilitate such collaboration.

You can bypass the "Catalyst Tools Login" page in the future by indicating that you would like to have your computer remember your choice of Identity Provider. If at some point you would like to change Identity Providers, you can view the WAYF screen again by removing cookies from your Web browser.

What is ProtectNetwork?

ProtectNetwork is an independent Identity Provider service. They provide open standards-based, federated, online user identities (ProtectNetwork IDs). ProtectNetwork IDs enable authorized access to Web applications, like the Catalyst Web Tools, that are protected with open standard technologies such as Shibboleth or OpenID. In other words, after registering with ProtectNetwork, they will vouch for you when another online service using the same technology wants to verify your identity.

What does a ProtectNetwork ID allow?

The Solstice-based Catalyst Web Tools—namely Collect It, GoPost, Group Manager, QuickPoll, ShareSpaces, UMail, and WebQ—are now accessible with a ProtectNetwork ID. You can grant ProtectNetwork ID users access as either a participant or a collaborator in these tools. For example, your co-instructor from another university can now comment on student papers in a Collect It dropbox; your research colleagues can collaborate on documents using SharedSpaces or download survey results from WebQ; or your guest lecturer can read and respond to student questions on a GoPost discussion board.