Within the European University Alliance CHARM-EU, Utrecht University collaborates with eight other European partners. One of the most important educational activities is a joint Master’s program. In the past, all students and faculty members of this program were issued a UU identity to log in to the IT services associated with the program. However, this was inefficient and not very user-friendly, as everyone had to switch between different identities. We have now resolved this: we utilized SURF’s SRAM service—originally designed for research—to establish a comprehensive IT service for this Joint Master’s program. The services in the Master’s Virtual Learning Environment can now be provided by various partners (Budapest, Utrecht), and users from all nine partner institutions can log in using their local institutional identity. This is made possible by the underlying eduGAIN/MyAcademicID federation that the SRAM service utilizes.

Within an SRAM implementation, the coordinator can create a hierarchy, consisting of three levels: organization, collaboration and groups. At each level, users can be allocated access rights, governing what they can or cannot access and edit. A cohort of an educational programme, for example, can receive a label as a ‘group’, so that teachers and students who are involved in that programme are guided towards the documentation of the correct cohort.

This has led us to an authentication method that is based on partner identities via eduGAIN. Joint IT systems can be relatively easily connected. The central management of roles and rights via group memberships is managed centrally and synchronized automatically in connected systems.

For CHARM, this approach has paved the way for a more equal partnership, in which, in principle, all participating universities can make parts of the IT infrastructure available. Ease of use for students and faculty of the Joint Program has also improved significantly, as they can now use their own, familiar login credentials.

• The Blueprint for our IT Architecture is available in a document that lists and compares different architecture approaches: High-level CHARM-EU architecture – CHARM-EU
• The SURF SRAM platform is explained on the webpage of SURF: SURF Research Access Management | SURF.nl
• In a presentation for the FOREU IT group, CHARM staff explained their lessons learnt on the topic of joint identity management (login necessary) CHARM-IdentityManagement_06-02-2026.pdf – Agora Cloud

Step-by-step guide: