Services

A Penn State Access Account is a digital identity for students, faculty, staff, and designated affiliates of the University. The electronic profile grants permissions to users for protected online University resources and services. Access Accounts provide usability to the University community at all points of the day, while maintaining a high level of security.

Authentication is the process by which a user interacts with a computer and a computer program to validate or confirm one's identity. This may be performed via the correct combination of username and password, presentation of digital certificate, or other methods.

Authorization is the process of deciding if a user is allowed to access the service he or she has requested.

AIT provides the Movable Type publishing platform to individual student, staff and faculty members of the Penn State community via The Blogs at Penn State.

The Co-location Center (COLO) is a central-housing, secure, climate controlled facility for computer systems available to Penn State departments and units for a monthly fee.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a client/server mechanism by which machine names get "mapped" (or equated) to IP addresses.

AIT maintains a full suite of extended services associated with Penn State's primary e-mail servers.

Kerberos is a standards based, lightweight, efficient, multi-platform enterprise authentication system based on strong symmetric cryptography.

The keytab generator is an online, self-service method for users to generate kerberos keytabs for use with the Penn State Access Account (dce.psu.edu) kerberos realm.

For information about Penn State Access Account Storage Space (PASS), please visit: http://its.psu.edu/PASS

The Penn State Directory service provides a searchable source of information about Penn State personnel, departments, groups, and roles.

TrackITS is a joint effort between ITS Financial Services and Applied Information Technologies (AIT) to develop an online purchase and asset tracking system.

University Collaboration Suite (UCS) is a collection of services and tools that support collaboration across multiple platforms. In addition to being an e-mail and calendaring client, UCS provides file sharing, tasks, contacts, document management (including version control), and many more electronic collaboration features.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a secure encrypted network connection. You may want to use a VPN to connect from your third-party Internet Service Provider (ISP) to Penn State services and resources.

AIT provides Web hosting for individuals and groups.

Penn State WebMail, https://webmail.psu.edu/, is a web-based e-mail client that provides Penn State students, faculty, and staff with anytime, anywhere access to their Penn State e-mail via a web browser. The easy-to-use interface lets users create and organize mailboxes, access directory services, create and add personalized signatures, and change a variety of settings.

WebRAT stands for Web-based Role Assignment Tool. A Role is a group defined by specific attributes. WebRAT is a tool used to manage the membership of these groups. Both a Role and the Attributes used to describe that role are kept in our Penn State Enterprise Directory Service (sometimes known as LDAP). Those Roles, these special groups with specifically defined attributes, can be populated with members which can be anyone having a Penn State Access Account userid.

Information Technology Services (ITS) provides a Windows Active Directory® Forest [ACCESS.PSU.EDU] for use by the entire University community that leverages the open standards-based Digital Credential Management. Any Penn State organization can use our core authentication (Kerberos V) and authorization (LDAP) services for account management.