The VHO service

While the VHO service (hard- and software) is operated by SWITCH, the registration of the end users and the maintenance of accounts is under the responsibility of the resource owner who wants certain VHO groups of VHO end users to be included into the VHO.

VHO service

The VHO administrator registers end users. The VHO administrator, appointed by the resource owner, is responsible for:

  • correct and well maintained account data (e.g. deleted, when a user is no longer using the resource)
  • generating a username and initial password and transmission of these credentials to the end user
  • end user support

Administration tool

SWITCH provides the VHO administrator tool, which allows VHO administrators to manage the assigned groups and end users.

Managing groups

The administrator has an overview of all the groups, which he is responsible for
A group overview lists all administrators of that group and provides a simple ‘new administrator invitation’ functionality
Defining the content of the support page for this group
Customizing e-mail templates, i.e. ‘new user’ or ‘reset password’

Managing end users

Well arranged user list with the ability to execute some predefined actions, like:
  • expire some or all user
  • delete some or all user
  • download some or all users as a list
Different colours display the state of each user (active, expired, deleted). The administrator can sort the users by their attributes or perform wildcard searches
Straightforward user creation and modification, including password reset by form...
...or easy mass user creation by file upload
Some goodies for the administrator: Set default values for the managed group. Define custom views for the user list

End user services

SWITCH provides for VHO end users some common functionality:

VHO users enjoy web single sign on at the VHO home organization like each other user in the federation
Every VHO user can change the own password, provided they do not want to use the generated one. An appropriate password policy ensures good passwords
Users can visit the general VHO support page and find helpful contact information about their group

The VHOtools are written in PHP using Smarty and MySQL. It is developed under a BSD license and if you would like to get the code, please write an email to aai@switch.ch.

Back to the VHO website