I'm trying to understand the differences between:
*phpMyAdmin *SAML *OpenID *OpenVPN
You should only consider SAML and OpenID. More exactly, you should really only consider SAML, since the resources you are trying to connect to only support SAML, and not OpenID. We can use OpenID for proxied access to resources that don't support SAML, but it's very likely nearly all of the resources we're trying to access support SAML.
Ideally we'd integrate central auth with something that supports multiple protocols. SimpleSAMLPHP supports SAML, OpenID, OAuth and a few other protocols. It also can handle the circles of trust that we'd need to create with the libraries/universities.
- Ryan