Top 5 Features of InAcademia
InAcademia has now been in production for just over 2 years and now provides affiliation verification for up to 13,000,000 students in 11 countries across Europe. We recently conducted a client survey to gain some insight into what aspects of our service they most benefited from.
The following list of features that are most popular.
- IdP Hint Assertion
First on the list is the IdP Hint Assertion feature. Used in conjunction with the IdP Hinting feature, this helps merchants verify that the validation returns from the institution used to initiate the validation. The validation response will confirm that the user authenticated at the specific institution that was the subject of the request. This feature adds a further level of validation, ensuring that the user is affiliated with the specific institution they claim to be a member of when registering for the customer’s services. This is of particular benefit to organisations wishing only to offer services to particular groups of institutions.
- Feedback in negative scenarios
Who would have thought negative feedback would be popular with our clients but this is actually very useful!
As the name suggests this feature allows you to ensure that you do not inadvertently allow a user access to the service in question if they are not entitled to do so. This occurs if the end-user does not hold the required affiliation, the institution returns an authentication error or if the user denied consent to share its affiliation with you. This can be an important element of fraud detection as the ability to filter out ineligible users can be as valuable as providing access to eligible users.
Providing meaningful feedback helps organisations present the correct workflow to their users in the event that a validation request has failed and enables them to deal appropriately with the user.
- Discovery Service
The Discovery Service is a simple interface that can be provided as part of the validation process which enables the user to select their desired institution from a pre-populated list of institutions. This feature proves popular with customers that prefer not to maintain a database of institutions. As such, this is well suited for smaller organisations that do not have sufficient development resources but is also useful to those organisations that are looking to quickly deploy academic affiliation validation.
- IdP Hinting
Just missing the top spot is our IdP Hinting feature. It is not surprising that this ranks highly as it allows clients to streamline the user experience by passing users directly to their institutions log in page for validation. You can read a more detailed description of IdP Hinting here.
- Communication
We were really pleased to find that the aspect of our service that our customers value the most is our level of communication with them. This was particularly satisfying as we pride ourselves on being open and transparent in our dialogue with customers. The area of communication that was found to be most beneficial was news regarding forthcoming releases followed by updates on changes to the list of available institutions, which is vital when InAcademia provides access to almost 1000 institutions. As InAcademia is growing and developing so rapidly it is essential to keep all our users abreast of this change, we’re very happy that our clients appreciate this.
If you would like to find out more about InAcademia or have any questions about the verification processes used please feel free to contact us