Departmental Metrics
The OSF Institutions Metrics Dashboard can store information about the department or organizational membership of your users. We obtain this data from the response we receive from your institution’s server when a user signs in through the institution. Some coordination is needed for this, because not every institution supplies this by default or supplies the same kind of information.
If you would like to have this information added to your dashboard, here are the steps you can follow to do this:
Step 1
The first step is to contact whomever at your institution manages the SSO service. If you are already supplying useful information in your typical response, we just need to know where to find it, which should be easy for the SSO manager to answer.
Step 2
The information we are looking for is in a specific piece of metadata in an attribute in the response. The next step is to identify which attribute contains the correct data. We have sometimes seen it in an attribute called eduPersonPrimaryOrgUnitDN (OID: 1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.8), so that may be a good place to look, but this information is not always consistently supplied or used for valuable information.
If the SSO response does not contain an attribute with the relevant content, your SSO service may be able to add it.
Once the correct attribute has been identified, we can then update on our end to retrieve it.
Step 3
Once we know the attribute, the information will be gathered anytime a user logs in through the institutional login. This means that it may take some time for every user’s department to be populated. Later in the year we are planning on implementing a required re-authentication through the institutional login on a periodic basis, which will help ensure all of this information is accurate.
Not able to provide SSO response
If there is no way to get the information from the SSO response, we can add them manually from a spreadsheet. You would need to supply the user’s OSF id (which you can get from the User tab in the OSFI Metrics Dashboard) and department in any tabular format and we could populate the list. This would obviously require manual work on your part and would need to be periodically updated. It is not an ideal solution, but at the moment is the only alternative. If we find that there is a large demand for more alternative methods, we will consider them in future feature development planning.
If you are interested in seeing help guides intended for general OSF users, please see our OSF support center Help Guides