Words: Andrijana Todosijevic (AMRES) and Anastas Mishev (UKIM / MARnet)
GÉANT’s flagship services like eduGAIN and eduroam are key to collaboration, mobility and research advancement across Europe. eduGAIN, in particular, plays a crucial role in enabling secure and seamless access to online resources for students, researchers, and educators across institutions and countries. By interconnecting identity federations, it allows users to access academic and research services using their home institution credentials, reducing the need for multiple accounts and passwords. This enhances security and simplifies access management while also fostering international collaboration by enabling trusted authentication across borders.
eduGAIN is also integral to initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and Erasmus Without Paper (EWP), it supports e-infrastructures, and enables large-scale research collaborations by providing secure, federated access to computing resources, datasets, and high-performance networks. By ensuring interoperability and compliance with data protection regulations, eduGAIN strengthens the foundation of Europe’s digital academic and research ecosystem.
In the past few months, several activities have been undertaken to enlarge eduGAIN’s user base at institutions in South-East Europe.
Supporting eduGAIN uptake and fostering collaboration in Serbia and in the SEE region
As part of its long-standing commitment to supporting its users, the Academic Network of the Republic of Serbia – AMRES – has been organising a series of training sessions in the Trust & Identity and Security fields for its member institutions, seeking to facilitate and encourage their use of AMRES services. A particular focus was placed on iAMRES – the national Identity Federation and member of eduGAIN which simplifies Single Sign-On (SSO) access to web services, allowing users to authenticate with a single digital identity issued by their home institution.
In line with this mission, AMRES organised in December 2024 a successful iAMRES Identity Federation Training, bringing together representatives from nine member institutions to support them in the process of joining the iAMRES Identity Federation and eduGAIN. This initiative aimed to expand the number of institutions connected to the iAMRES Identity Federation, while strengthening the expertise of their IT staff responsible for digital identity management.
The training combined theoretical knowledge with hands-on exercises, allowing participants to apply key concepts in configuring and maintaining Identity Providers and Service Providers. Attendees were equipped with the necessary tools and materials, as the implementation guidelines and technical resources provided by AMRES to allow institutions to efficiently manage the authentication and authorisation infrastructure. Guided exercises encouraged collaborative learning and helped attendees to troubleshoot challenges while under expert supervision.
While the training was tailored for IT staff from AMRES member institutions, it also addressed the status of other Identity Federations in the region. In this context, colleagues from the University of Montenegro (MREN) joined the initiative, gaining valuable insights into the fundamental principles of the Identity Federation and its significance in research and education.
Beyond technical expertise, the training provided a platform for strengthening professional connections, fostering collaboration among institutions committed to advancing research and education networking in the region.
Expanding adoption of eduroam and eduGAIN in North Macedonia
In February 2025, the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius university in Skopje (FCSE, UKIM – the organisation providing the technical and human support to the North Macedonian NREN MARnet) organised a national workshop to support universities in the country toward their adoption of eduroam and eduGAIN.
Around twenty IT specialists from six North Macedonian universities actively took part in the workshop, receiving guidance on the implementation of eduroam and eduGAIN for their students and staff.
The workshop was structured in two parts. During the preparatory activities, in the weeks before the event, experts from FCSE, UKIM, and contributors to the GÉANT project shared the preliminary steps participants needed to take beforehand, as well as pre-installed VMs and manuals on how to establish the necessary infrastructure and connect it with their own user databases. Then, during the hands-on session at the workshop, participants undertook the final steps to enable the services and joined a comprehensive Q&A session.
As a result of the training, one additional university in North Macedonia is now set to deploy eduroam, while five more are expected to join the national Identity Federation AAIEDU.mk, member of eduGAIN. This will have a significant impact on the involvement of North Macedonian students and academics in pan-European activities like the Erasmus programme and will provide them with seamless access to a plethora of resources such as the ones provided by the EOSC EU Node and EGI, to name a few.
The team at FCSE, UKIM stays committed to support all the members of MARnet in adopting services provided by GÉANT and the NREN community, empowering them to strengthen and enhance research and education nationally.
Finally, the training was also an excellent learning opportunity for FCSE, UKIM student Jovan Simonoski, recently selected to take part in the GÉANT Trust and Identity Mentorship (TIM) programme. This allowed him to explore technical aspects of eduroam and eduGAIN and contributed to preparing him for his graduation thesis on a related subject and for the activities expected as part of the TIM Programme.
