Re: Guest Access in a CMS

[Jeremy Mooney <j-mooney () BETHEL EDU>]

Geoff Nathan wrote on 2006/02/20 10:39:
> We've had a request from a faculty member to permit the author of the
> textbook she is using to join in a chat session with the class (it's an
> advanced graduate level course).  The guest, obviously from another
> university, doesn't have a Blackboard ID at Wayne, and we're having a
> debate about how to deal with this--the guest would only need access for
> a couple of hours, once.  How have folks been dealing with this kind of
> short-term, but fairly deep access permission?

We use the webserver authentication for Blackboard, which uses session
keys with our central authentication system.  What we've done for a
couple cases like this is create a blackboard account with the desired
access and insert a session key with appropriate expiry data.  Once
that's set we set up a temporary URL which will inject that session key,
and give it to the appropriate person.  A bit of a hack, but it's
effective and since in our system the session key is tied to the service
there's no way to use it to get into other resources.

--
Jeremy Mooney
ITS - Bethel University