This page sets out to explain how HEIs that hold an Erasmus Charter for Higher Education (ECHE) can join the EWP network. Organisational units of a given HEI (faculties, departments) or consortia are not allowed to connect to the network separately.

Procedure

If you are using software from a third party provider, you will join EWP via your provider. Your provider will need to upload information on the registration portal where the institution (the so-called EWP-administrator) will need to confirm they are supported by this provider for using EWP:


  1. The third party provider needs to undergo a technical admission procedure:
    1. The third party provider needs to register as a new provider in the registration portal staging environment (a copy of the production environment linked to the EWP development network);
    2. In this portal the provider will need to upload a signed Collaboration Agreement determining the terms of use of  the EWP Development Network and setting the conditions to link the Provider’s external software to the EWP Development Network as well as the right to use the name and logo of EWP in its documentation;
    3. Upon the countersigning of the MoU by the EWP Consortium, an account will be created in the staging registration portal;
    4. The provider will upload a link to the manifest file(s) for its testing instance(s);
    5. The provider performs some automated self-tests;
    6. The provider contacts the ESCI Service Desk with a request for information or guidance (non-student issues) asking to test their APIs with the reference implementation;
    7. The EWP technical team will go through the testing scenarios for IIAs and/or LAs as described in GitHub.
  2. Upon technical admission, the third party provider needs to register as a new provider in the registration portal;
  3. In this portal the provider will need to upload the signed Collaboration Agreement determining the terms of use of  the EWP Network and setting the conditions to link the provider’s external software to the EWP Network, as well as the right to use the name and logo of EWP in its documentation;
  4. The EWP team will verify if the third party provider underwent the technical admission. If that’s the case the signed Collaboration Agreement will be uploaded and an account will be created in the registration portal;
  5. The provider can now deliver the manifest file for each of their customers. This manifest file contains amongst other things information on which APIs the provider supports for the higher education institution in question;


The EWP-admin from the higher education institution needs to log in to the registration portal as HEI and confirm their institution is represented by the provider for the given APIs (this step only works for EWP-admins).

For the time being, this step is taken care of by the EWP technical support team until a majority of HEIs support the EWP admin entitlement. This is to ensure higher education institutions can keep using EWP services in this transitional period.


Start exchanging via EWP

Once the steps above are completed, higher education institutions can start exchanging data via EWP in their productive environment. They need to use the functionalities provided by their provider who is responsible for accurate training and support for using EWP-related functionalities. 

As part of their obligations, software providers agree not to add additional APIs to their production manifest file before they have released and tested these new APIs in the development environment.

Revocation

One should keep in mind that things can go wrong. When institutions violate the use of the EWP network there should be an exit strategy. Institutions can report implementation issues of any particular node via the ESCI Service Desk. The EWP management will try to settle disputes and has the authority to exclude any institution from the production registry if it is in violation of the terms of usage. The institution will need to prove its ability and trustworthiness again in the development environment.