Grouper Developers Forum

["Jessica Bibbee" <>]

Grouper Conference Call
August 9, 2006

*Participants*
Tom Barton, U. Chicago (chair)
Blair Christensen, U. Chicago
Joy Veronneau, U. Cornell
Gary Brown, U. Bristol
Brendan Bellina, USC
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Ann West, EDUCAUSE/Internet2
Jessica Bibbee, Internet2 (scribe)

New *Action Items*
[AI] {Tom} will email the list with a revised list of potential topics, including priority. The Group should send feedback to the list if changes are desired.

Carry-Over *Action Items*
[AI] {Tom} will work with {SteveO} to create higher-level screenshots. (12-Jul-06)

*Agenda*:
1. i2mi-common
2. Issue Tracking
3. Discussion to influence choice of next steps for design & development (cf. Tom's email 8-Aug)

*Discussion*
{Blair} provided an update of recent discussions regarding an I2MI-common area for collection of 3rd party libraries, eventually where Signet/Grouper will normalize on same version of these libraries to ease deployment. Discussion will continue in Signet/Grouper Working Group calls.

{Blair} is looking at using another issue tracker other than Bugzilla (cf. email 7-Aug), as he says much time is wasted working with Bugzilla itself, instead of with the issues/bugs. He is looking into Google Code <http://code.google.com/p/i2mi-grouper/>, which so far seems to be the simplest. However, he will be experimenting with JIRA on another project, and so will also consider JIRA as an alternative for the I2MI-Grouper project.

{Brendan} suggested that the chosen issue tracker should be coordinated with other Middleware projects, such as Signet and Shibboleth. In this way, there will be congruency among the individual and collective applications, rather than having to readdress these issues farther down the road.

The last items of discussion pertained to the next areas of work for the Grouper Working Group (cf. Tom's email, 8-Aug.)  From the following list,
          1. aging of groups & memberships
          2. sorting of various lists in the UI
          3. history, audit
                    - the MW-E2ED (End-2-End Diagnostics) Advisory Group is working on EDDY,
                      a framework for analyzing log messages from multiple sources:
                      <http://middleware.internet2.edu/e2ed/>
          4. notification, changes
                    - event based provisioning
                    - includes creation, deletion, changes to, and updates of groups
          5. provisioning connectors
          6. live interfaces for query, management
                    - same idea as provisioning, but with a web services style oriented
                      towards management
          7. symbolic links
          8. persistent storage supporting UI personalization

, the Group discussed each item and which were of primary and secondary concern.  The top item of interest is (#5) provisioning connectors. Next in line are (#4) notification, changes and (#6) live interfaces for query, management.  Following these are (#2) sorting of various lists in the UI and (#7) symbolic links.  Last in the line up of priority are (#1) aging of groups & memberships and (#3) history, audit. [AI] {Tom} will email the list with a revised list of potential topics, including priority. The Group should send feedback to the list if changes are desired.

As these items progress in their development, {Tom} is interested in maintaining discussion with USC and Cornell to see how they are advancing in their deployment path.

{Will} commented that USC is interested in expanding what custom group types can do, such as being able to select attributes from a set of values to ensure a value is not typo-ed. {Joy} requested a need for a save-and-restore utility, which offers capability of putting groups on a sort of probation if rules have been broken.

The next scheduled Grouper WG call will be Wednesday, 23-Aug at 12pm EDT.