UW Napster goes live!

Our local Napster service here at the UW went live for registration this morning. The service is open to all students living in the UW Residence Halls, with no fee.

Rick Ells put together a very nice web page that highlights Napster and other digital music services that we think are likely to be of interest to students and other music fans here at the UW.

One thing that's significant about this service is that we and Napster are using Shibboleth, the Internet2 software for cross-domain authentication, to allow students to register for this service using their UW NetID. This is not Napster's first implementation of Shibboleth, but it's a great demonstration of the use of standards - Napster doesn't have to do separate coding to support each institution's local authentication system.

Nice work, everybody!

There's still lots of work to be done, including the installation of the local caching servers from Dell - we're looking forward to seeing how usage ramps up here at the UW.