In recent months, our team has been focused on aligning our service more closely with our high value priorities as noted in our Terms of Service:
As a University-funded service, we hold the following items as high value priorities and will prioritize these items over all other requests:
- Infrastructure performance and reliability
- An easy and maintainable upgrade process for WordPress Core, plugins and the UW Theme
- Producing standards compliant code
- Following industry standards and best practices
- Adhering to campus branding
- Training and supporting campus users
In doing so, we have identified an area that is impeding the service’s ability to ensure infrastructure performance and reliability as well as its ability to preserve a maintainable upgrade process for WordPress Core, plugins and the UW Theme. The area that is affecting these values of the service is supporting sites with Shibboleth protections (locking a site or pages to NetID and/or Manifest Groups).
While only a subset of our customer base is utilizing this technology (1-2%), these sites require a considerable amount of time and resources to troubleshoot issues, assist with setup, and support long term. Additionally, sites protected at the root require the service to maintain a completely separate server for roughly 13 of our 1,500 sites.
It is for these reasons that the service has decided to freeze all new requests for Manifest Groups/Shibboleth protection for WiscWeb sites.
What are the alternative options available to me?
For those looking for protections to pages or their entire sites, we offer other options for protecting WiscWeb content. If you have questions about any of these options, we ask that you please reach out to the WiscWeb Support team for more details: cms-support@doit.wisc.edu.
We want to thank you all for your continued loyalty and support as we work through some of these more difficult changes. If you have questions or concerns about this decision, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at cms-support@doit.wisc.edu.