This is the landing page of SURFconext. From here on you can navigate through our documentation and find out what SURFconext can do for you and how to get connected. Administrators and engineers from both Identity Providers (IdP's) as well as Service Providers (SP's), or Relying Parties (RP's) in OIDC terminology, can start here.

SURFconext offers 'Single Sign On'-access to a large and increasing number of online services . About 200 Dutch organizations in the area of secondary vocational-, higher education and research are using SURFconext for this. Together these organizations represent a group of about 1.5 million users who generate millions of logins per month .

Image RemovedWhat can you do with SURFconext?

SURFconext offers 'Single Sign On'-access to a large and increasing number of online services. About 200 Dutch organizations in the area of secondary vocational-, higher education and research are already using these. Among the most used services are Brightspace, SURFspot, Blackboard, Google Apps for Education and several library services.

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What advantages does SURFconext offer for my organisation?

The group of almost 120 organisations (connected IdP's) in The Netherlands who use SURFconext, consists of universities, university hospitals and tertiary medical teaching hospitals, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and senior secondary vocational education institutions. Together they represent a group of 1.5 million users. These users generate almost 2 million logins per month, using more than 100 different cloud services.

SURFconext allows users to have access to services offered by multiple Service Providers using only 1 account. Besides, SURFconext facilitates online collaboration in the cloud, both between users within the same organisation as between users from different organisations.

For IdP's

If you connect your organisation to SURFconext, you will enjoy the following advantages:

• By connecting to SURFconext only once, you can thereafter easily provide users access to any of the connected services.
• You don't have to implement and maintain a custom made connection to each service or Service Provider separately.
• You can regulate authorisation for entire groups of students and employees easily.
• The number of available services is ever growing, since more and more organisations choose to use SURFconext.
• You can integrate your internal authorization resources with SURFconext.
• Integrates perfectly with SURFsecureID for strong authentication.
• Easy integration of services thanks to open standards.
• Even on mobile devices.

For SP's

• Connecting once to the platform makes your service available to all connected institutions (connected IdP's).
• Fast and easy access for more than 1.5 million users.
• Certainty about identity of users, at every authentication.
• Less user administration.
• SURF can provide you with a privacy (GDPR) friendly user identifier.
• A single point of contact with one connection.
• A long-time trusted partner of education and research institutions.
• Integrates perfectly with SURFsecureID for strong authentication.
• Also on mobile devices.

For end users

• Simple, secure access to cloud services with the institution's account, i.e. no need for separate user accounts for individual services (single sign-on).
• Protection of privacy in the sense that the minimum amount of personal data is disclosed to the service provider.
• It is always clear with which services the user's data is being shared.
• Access to services from the international education and research community.
• Easily prove your relation to (an) institution(s).

Why should I connect to SURFconext?

Get to know more SURFconext here and watch a short introduction video.

Whether you find connecting to SURFconext easy or not, depends on your knowledge and background of our used protocols. Developers familiar with these are able to connect services within a days work. Take your time to get to know SAML or OpenID Connect. These are open standards and used in most countries and many sectors. So whenever and wherever you're offering your service, you can re-use this time and effort you've put into connecting to SURFconext.

Getting Started

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Contact us!

If you have any questions you can get in touch with us for answers to all of your questions about SURFconext. We prefer to be contacted by mail at support@surfconext.nl. Support by mail allows us to send and receive links, screenshots, metadata and lot's more, helping us to answer your questions more efficiently. If you think this doesn't work for you or you are having trouble formulating your question and prefer to talk to us directly, we will give you a call. Send us a mail with your contact information, including your phone number of course, and we will get back to youSee the above mentioned advantages. The number of available cloud services is growing quickly. Most organisations consider to use these services combined with internally hosted services. Besides, organisations want to offer a secure environment where both internal and external services can be used side by side. Important elements for this are Single Sign-On, trusted identity and collaboration in groups and teams. Organisations are looking for possibilities to integrate these different kinds of applications. SURFconext offers starting points to realise this.