Blackboard SSO using an icon on the icon bar
Hi,
We're trying to get SSO to Blackboard (Webct) to work with a Bb icon on the icon bar. We have the SSO working in the My Courses channel, but our students don't often use that. Has anyone sucessfully made an icon connect straight into someone's Blackboard home page?
We've worked with both Blackboard and Sungard and neither one seems to be able to make this work - even though Sungard's User Interface Customization Guide uses "webct" as an example for custom icons.
We're on Luminis IV 4.2.2. Apparently this was easy in Luminis 3? Any hints you could provide would be most appreciated!
what have you tried so far, and what are you trying to achieve
It sounds like you are trying to have something like this:
An icon, that when clicked opens a new browser window. The link that the icon calls is the single sign on for Blackboard (with a standard location of the user's home blackboard tab).
We currently do not do this with an icon, but do have a "Quick Links" channel on our Portal "Home" tab. This is a straight <a href="/site/sso/blackboard.html" target="_blank">My VLE</a>
the /site/sso/blackboard.html preloads some cookies from blackboard and then calls our GCF to sign the user into blackboard (currently via javascript - but we do have some very slightly more sophisticated ones that use jsp).
To add an icon I would first look at $CP_ROOT/custom/classic and probably add something into customIcons.xsl - but the "User Interface Customization Guide" should describe this in a lot more detail.
Is this helpful, or am I missing what you are trying to achieve?
Derek
University of Leeds, UK
exactly right
We already have the icon working. Right now it takes users to the Blackboard login page.
What we want is very much as you describe.
Did you create your own GCF for this?
We use our own GCF
Yes, we have our own GCF to sign in to Blackboard 7
If your links in My Courses work then it should not be too hard to re-use that though - at least I would hope not.
Our GCF is a Pickup Response, and signing in is straightforward as Blackboard uses the same credentials as our Portal. There are already several posts on LDN about developing SSO to Blackboard.
Derek
University of Leeds, UK