Education ID & access
Eduserv announces that OpenAthens LA 2.0, a single-sign on developed for UK universities and colleges, that  includes support for Google Apps
enabling  institutions to allow their staff and students to log-in to services such as Gmail and Google Docs with existing logins.

Managing digital IDs and access rights is a challenge facing many academic institutions. Traditionally this has been to provide access to academic journals and other learning resources, but grown to include online services such as virtual learning environments and online collaboration tools.

OpenAthens LA 2.0, one of Eduserv’s suite of access & identity management services, enables organisations - primarily in higher and further education - to use existing student and staff accounts to log in to multiple external and internal online resources. Organisations can now use OpenAthens LA 2.0 to log-in to Google Apps, which provides advert-free, domain-based versions of  Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs applications.

OpenAthens customers can achieve this integration very easily with just a few clicks in the web-based OpenAthens LA 2.0 administration console.
David Orrell, (left) Senior Access and Identity Management Architect at Eduserv, said: “With a growing number of organisations turning to Google and Microsoft for outsourced services such as email, calendars and online document collaboration, it’s vital that students can use their existing logins to access these services.”

DNAStar for plants moves to food science
Wageningen  University has inked a broad site-license agreement for the US DNAStar's Lasergene sequence-analysis software. Under the terms of the license, all researchers in the Department of Agrotechnology and Food Sciences will have unlimited use of the software for their sequence-analysis projects.

The site license will include the latest version of Lasergene, which provides users with automated virtual MultiSite Gateway cloning capabilities and other features, said Madison, Wisconsin based DNAStar

Back In September 2008, Wageningen University licensed Lasergene for use among scientists at the Department of Plant Science and at Plant Research International, both part of the university.

Shielded database acquisition
IBM is expected to announce the acquisition of database security start-up Guardium for $225m.  Guardium started as an Israeli firm in 2002 but moved to Boston in 2003. It has 60 employees.

The company a subsidiary of Israel's Log-On Software raised $21m venture capital funds from Ascent Venture Partners, Israel's StageOne Ventures, Veritas, and Cisco Systems .

Guardium's product enables companies to extend the use of corporate applications to customers, partners and providers, but ensure that the databases used by those applications are shielded.