Academic research has always been characterized by intense collaborations between people and groups from different institutions. Modern IT and especially IT networks have transformed the form of these collaborations: researchers can access and share data remotely, they can access online resources such as journals or scientific instruments. 

In this context,

Scientific research is at the heart of every European University. Nowadays, such research is no longer an isolated activity. With the capabilities of the internet to connect not only people but also resources, sciences have evolved into e-Science where individual participants in an experiment, paper collaboration or users of specific Research Infrastructures come together from a wide range of countries and organisations.

Authentication and authorisation infrastructures (AAI) are required have been developed to regulate who can gain access to which resources in such distributed environments. While federated identity . Federated identity and eduGAIN go a long way to enabling such access policies for single users or research groups belonging to the same institutions. Thanks to single-sign-on they have built a scalable environment.

When they originate from researchers in different countries and institutions, research collaborations sometimes need additional specialised infrastructure so that they benefit from the same benefits in terms of AAI. eduTEAMS is being , in many cases, research groups of all sizes need additional specialised infrastructure built on top of eduGAIN to manage address this need. eduTEAMS aims to simplify the management of group and authorisation information, and also to integrate . It aims to enable the integration users from a wide range of environment, connecting them to their specific services (such as instruments), and also to other generic services such as storage and compute provided by any eInfrastructure provider or even commercial entity. It is a key goal of eduTEAMS that it is possible to integrate with services provided by any eInfrastructure, Research Infrastructure or long tail simple collaboration.

eduTEAMS is being designed and piloted by GÉANT in two variants to meet those needs:

Phases 1: Basic service:

• includes Membership management, Identity Hub for non eduGAIN users, Basic Groups, and Basic Provisioning
• allows end users of eduGAIN members to be able to login
• has infrastructure operation provided by GÉANT 
• is offered to users at no additional cost

Phase 2: Advanced service:

• includes the same features as  the basic offering, plus Advanced Groups, Attribute Management, Advanced (de-)Provisioning, SP proxy, Attribute Aggregation