Grouper Developers Forum

["Jessica Bibbee" <>]

Grouper WG Conference Call
November 15, 2006

*Participants*
Tom Barton, U. Chicago (chair)
Gary Brown, U. Bristol
R.L. "Bob" Morgan, U. Washington
Pam Allen, U. Wisconsin
Chuck Miller, U. Wisconsin
Brendan Bellina, USC
Ann West, EDUCAUSE/Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Jessica Bibbee, Internet2 (scribe)

New *Action Items*
[AI] {Brendan and Bob} will write a use case for multi-valued attributes.

Carry-Over *Action Items*
[AI] {Joy} will share a write-up of a Cornell use case for the provisioning connector regarding the preservation of a query for group attributes.
[AI] {Blair} will share his testing results with the Working Group. (6-Sep-06)
[AI] {Stephen L. and Blair} will speak offline regarding the development of additional interfaces. (6-Sep-06)
[AI] {Stephen L.} will pass along a link to their CVS for a model similar to the Grouper object model, including use cases and code. (6-Sep-06)

*Agenda*
1. Distributed Access Management CAMP & follow-on early adopters meeting
2. Upcoming Internet2 Member Meeting: Signet-Grouper combined working group; Signet-Grouper early adopters meeting. Who's coming? Combine them?
3. How to identify & solve performance issues with particular RDBMSs?
4. Use cases for web services interface(s) for query & management

*Discussion*
The Group briefly followed up on questions and comments regarding the recent CAMP: Distributed Access Management Infrastructure, November 7-9 <http://www.educause.edu/CAMP064>. Uploaded proceedings from the sessions can be found at <http://www.educause.edu/Presentations/11294>. Notes from the Early adopter meeting can be found at <http://middleware.internet2.edu/signet/minutes/Signet-Grouper-EarlyAdopters-9-November-2006.html >, and action items will soon be incorporated.

There is an upcoming Fall 2006 Internet2 Member Meeting December 4-7, Chicago, IL: Fall Internet2 Member Meeting <http://events.internet2.edu/2006/fall-mm/index.html>. Note: Instead of having separate Signet/Grouper combined working group and Early Adopters' meetings, they will now be combined and held at the same time, 8:30-10am, 4-Dec. {Tom and Lynn McRae} are drafting an agenda for the meeting. Please email agenda topics and discussion ideas to Grouper mailing list.

{Tom} inquired about RDBMSs that people are using, as he hopes to identify existing performance issues. University of Wisconsin are using Oracle and MySQL, and {Tom} expressed interest in getting performance data for MySQL.

The Group talked about the development of use cases for web services interface for query and management. {Joy} has done some prototyping, and {Steve Langella} has started some work related to the caBIG Identity and Access Management infrastructure. There has been some interest in a combined interface for Grouper and Signet, perhaps via a SOAP integration of the front end and Grouper back end.  {Bob} shared his campus' scenario – a homegrown LMS that includes group management. They would like to extend this as one of the preferred management UIs. They are already using web services to these systems and would want for their UI to access a Grouper UI. It would need to be an alternate Grouper UI running on a separate box from the group registry. 

{Brendan} said USC is interested in using the Grouper interface for 1) admins currently constructing groups for purpose of application authorization, and 2) the end user to be able to manage the memberships by themselves. Their backup plan is to write their own GUI and make calls to Grouper, rather than set up a new database. He said the hold-up is that the current GUI does not support multi-valued attributes. {Gary} said the current API doesn't support multi-valued attributes, but if it did, then it was also be available in the UI.

[AI] {Brendan and Bob} will write a use case for multi-valued attributes.

{Brendan} also said that USC management is looking fondly upon web services, and {Tom} said there might be some potential with the web services capability.

The next scheduled Grouper Working Group call will be Wednesday, November 30 at 12pm EST.

-- 
Jessica Bibbee, Technical Analyst
Internet2

mobile: +1-734-255-6644

The Fall 2006 Internet2 Member Meeting:
Because the best way to predict the future is to keep inventing it.
http://events.internet2.edu/2006/fall-mm/