Technical Support Options

Owned by Scott Cantor
Last updated: Oct 28, 2024
3 min read

The Shibboleth Consortium subsidizes and provides a few different avenues for obtaining help with the software produced by the Shibboleth Project, exploring advanced use cases, reporting bugs, and requesting new features.

Some of these options are openly available to anybody in the world in the fashion of most open source projects, while others are limited to those associated with Consortium Members and authorized by representatives of those members.

The Consortium subsidizes the operation of all these services, but support offered by the development team is only subsidized through the Members Only options described below. The open-to-everyone options are community-driven. Organizations with complex deployments and commensurately complex questions and needs are encouraged to join the Consortium.

Am I a member?

If you work for an organization that appears on this page, then you are a member (and you have the great appreciation of the project team). If your organization is not listed and you would like to check your membership status please reach out at contact@shibboleth.net

Many of those organizations, particularly the NRENs and Federations, are themselves collectives with their own membership. Being a member of those organizations does not make you a member of the Consortium. That has always been the case.

Available to Members

We have two member-specific support options :

  • A JIRA-based member-only project that provides a Q/A and problem resolution channel that is directly monitored by the development team. We are endeavoring to respond to most requests within a couple of business days and will do our best to resolve urgent problems that are impacting members within three business days when possible. Obviously longer "how do I do complex thing X?" questions are mostly open-ended.

  • A Slack instance available at https://shibboleth.slack.com for informal access to the team when we're available for quick help.

Both tools are limited to accounts that have been authorized for use by representatives of the various member organizations. We delegate the decision as to who and how many accounts have this access to each member, and if you do not have access and don't know who your representives are, we're happy to direct you if you contact us.

We will continue to field bug reports and enhancement requests from members through the standard issue tracker as we have in the past.

Available to All

We operate a number of mailing lists open to the public, enumerated here. You can subscribe via the mailman web interface.

  • Announcements of new releases, security patches, and important community information is available on the announce list.

  • General technical help with Shibboleth, and discussion with the community, is available on the users list.

  • Development advice associated with unreleased products, customizing the software, as well as (very limited) help with OpenSAML, is available on the dev list.

In addition to these lists, we continue to provide anybody with access to submit bug reports or file enhancement requests in our issue tracker.

For those needing dedicated support, consultant, or one-on-one help, we regret that the project does not have the capacity to offer that kind of assistance directly. We maintain a list of no-endorsement-implied commercial support options on our web site.

These are also training opportunities offered by various parties, usually paid, or as a benefit of other memberships: