The Helpdesk already emailed the campus about this, but I wanted to share this update as well:
Just a reminder that on February 15, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at the Twin Cities campus will upgrade the system that manages logins. In the past, the University of Minnesota has used a "Central Authentication Hub" system, which is an older login method. The new login system is called "Shibboleth", and gives us the ability to support more third-party applications using your University login.
We've actually been using a version of Shibboleth for a while now - Google and Zimride both use Shibboleth. The change on February 15 will phase in an updated Shibboleth system.
There are many changes happening "behind the scenes", but what you'll notice is a new login page. The newly designed sign-in page offers significant improvements. It has been updated to meet University branding standards, to accommodate screen readers, and to display on mobile devices. For a visual demonstration of the changes, compare the following:
Computing Services has been working very hard over the last few months, making sure all our applications are ready for the new version of Shibboleth. This is important, because any applications that still use CAH for authentication will continue to use the old sign in page. There will be no single sign on (SSO) between Shibboleth and CAH applications.
Since we've done this work ahead of time, you shouldn't notice any odd behavior during the upgrade - aside from the login page looking very different.
As always, we still recommend that you logout of applications (and/or close your browser) when you are done using them. There will be no single sign out between CAH and Shibboleth applications; users must sign out of both sets of applications separately. There will be no single sign out among Shibboleth applications. This means that users must sign out of each application separately.
