Letter to Implementers of eduPerson v 1.0
February 12, 2001

The release of eduPerson 1.0 is a milestone on the road to a common middleware infrastructure for educational institutions.  We have reached consensus on core attributes and the mechanisms by which they should be populated. Institutions waiting for stability in the specification can now proceed with implementation.

With more implementations comes higher visibility, and with higher visibility comes the participation of other stakeholders and interested parties.  We anticipate many suggestions from these new participants and we plan to produce versions 1.1, 1.2, and 2.0 as the standards and practices evolve.  The most immediate form of participation is to send email with suggestions to eduperson-comments@internet2.edu.   We are especially interested in hearing about new applications that might benefit from enhancements to the 1.0 specification.

Implementers of eduPerson should be aware of its planned evolution and exercise prudence.  A likely area of change will be to the list of allowed values for the eduPersonAffiliation and eduPersonPrimaryAffliliation attributes. The list of allowed values will certainly grow as new communities of interest focus on eduPerson.  Caution should be taken in the implementation of the business rules that populate these attributes to allow for ease of modification.  Directory-enabled applications that may make decisions based on the contents of these attributes should be tracked so that the implications of any change may be assessed.   Please be reassured that the allowed values defined in 1.0 will continue to be included unchanged in all future versions of the eduPerson specification.

We encourage you to monitor the http://www.educause.edu/eduperson web site and, in particular, to view the eduPerson FAQ found there for further crucial guidance on incorporating eduPerson 1.0 into your directory implementation.  The ongoing discussions on the mace-dir@internet2.edu list are also worth a look.  As always, participation in these discussions is encouraged.  Finally, we urge you to take full advantage of the rich font of directory advice to be found in the LDAP Recipe (http://www.georgetown.edu/giia/internet2/ldap-recipe/).