Why integrate with Single Sign On?
The valuable tools and resources that exist within your institution's digital ecosystem are often locked behind user authentication. When a student tries to access these tools, their user experience can quickly deteriorate amidst repeated prompts to login, forgotten passwords, and multiple possibilities for credential combinations. These barriers to access can ultimately derail a student from exploring and utilizing these necessary tools.
By implementing uConnect, you've already completed the first step to simplify access - by making everything visible all in one contextualized space. The next step? Enable Single Sign On (SSO).
SSO will allow a student to login to the uConnect platform using their institutional credentials. Those students who then click out to another tool promoted on the uConnect platform (that has also enabled SSO) may also be automatically logged in, and may be sent straight to that piece of content they were clicking on. This decreases that barrier to access, and provides a much cleaner, more streamlined user experience. Whether or not someone is automatically logged into another SSO authenticated tool is dependent on that tool's SSO configuration, as well as your own.
And the best part is that integrating with SSO is completely free, and included in every uConnect core platform contract.
Here's how it works
Without SSO, a student would have to remember a unique set of credentials for every resource on campus.
With SSO, one set of credentials can provide your students and faculty access to all the resources your promote within the SSO umbrella. When a student or staff member visits an access-restricted page (either on your uConnect platform, or by clicking on a link to one of your SSO enabled resources), the platform checks if that person is logged into their university account. If that user is logged in, that person may be given access to the content automatically with no effort on their part. If that user is not logged in, the person is redirected to your university's SSO and upon successful login redirected back to the restricted content.
In other words, SSO has the potential to unlock many doors for SSO enabled resources on campus, making it as simple as possible for users to engage with your resources and to support themselves on their career pathway.
