Courses and external collaborations in ERDA

Research rarely takes place at a single university, and in most projects there is an ongoing need to exchange data between institutions, with companies and across national borders. ERDA is designed to perform this task, so access to the system is not restricted by the outdated mindset that you have to be physically present at AU or use a VPN. Instead, we use a zero-trust security model  with strictly secured access for all users.

Of course, we cannot let just anyone have access to arbitrary data. Therefore, ERDA separates access at user and project level. External access requires that an AU employee vouches for the user, and this requires formal approval in agreement with the management. We have formalised this process through Peers. Through Peers, you can specify the external users you are going to work with or give them access in connection with courses or workshops.

As an AU employee, there are two roads open to you:

1. You can fill in the details of the external users and send them an invitation
2. The external users can sign up and then you can approve the creation of their account

External users must go through a separate login, in which they fill in a registration form, use their email as their username and select a code. If you use method 1., the form is prefilled-in, except for the password, but in method 2. the user has to fill in the form and write the name and AU email address of the employee who is to approve the account. 

In the example below, we show how to invite an external colleague to a collaboration.

If you select Invite on email, the system automatically sends an email to the user with a link to a prefilled-in registration form. Here they have to choose a code, accept the user rules, and click Send. 

NB: Label is a name you choose yourself to keep track of your peers. You cannot use spaces or special characters here, but you can use ”-” and ”_” to separate words.

The administrators will now create the user and send them a welcome email with login details. 

As an employee, you can use Show Peers to manage external contacts and send them an invitation, if you did not do so during the registration.

The ERDA administrators use Expire to set an expiry date for peer access. Access is always limited to one year at a time to reduce the number of inactive accounts, but it can be renewed without your approval if Expire is far enough into the future. When Expire expires, you will have to make a new Peer approval or update. 

If you want to change Expire, you can either do so under Enter Peers or Import Peers. You have to enter the same ID values again, select Update in the Action menu and set a new Expire.

In a project, the easiest way to share data is via shared folders, because then there is one copy that everyone can work in. 

In teaching situations, participants often need a copy of the material to work with. A common way to produce such material in ERDA is to create a folder with data and a read-only share link. Now you can give the participants the link or its ID, so they can download a copy of the data by importing the share link from the right-click menu in their ERDA Files.

Enter either the Share Link or the entire URL under Import.

Click OK to copy the content of the share link to your folder, so you can use it for exercises etc.