Grouper Developers Forum

[Bert Bee-Lindgren <>]

Unfortunately, I couldn't make today's call, but I saw the agenda  
topic "what people are doing." I thought I'd take the opportunity to  
summarize Georgia Tech's activities since the meeting in Washington.

We have completed development of, and are wrapping up alpha testing  
of, a GT Role System (GRS). We're expecting it to be in customer hands  
in July for testing and August for production for limited customers.  
At some level, you can equate Role == Group.

GRS's initial, accomplished design goals include the following major  
items:
  -Loader: Rules to match against subject sources (LDAP initially)  
and automatically add & remove subjects from roles
  -Loader: Grace periods associated with enabling rules
  -Admin UI: Full role/role-hierarchy/rule/access-control management
  -Admin UI: Manual overrides to add/remove subjects from roles...  
with (optional) automatic reversal of override at a future date or  
based on subject's data or roles
  -Access control: what role-memberships enable viewing/changing/ 
overriding/etc which other roles or role-hierarchy points
  -Audit: Permanent history of subjects' relationships with roles  
(permanent as long as role exists)

Relationship to Grouper:
        Technical relationship today: none
        Possible relationship:
		Right now GRS roles are boolean memberships and map very well into  
publishing them into grouper groups.
		If this were to change from boolean memberships to parameterized  
memberships (quota, scope, etc), then those details would not publish  
well into grouper

Medium-term plans (Now-Dec):
        Go into initial production without integration with Grouper
	See if early i2mi interest in GRS means that Open Sourcing GRS is  
valuable to community
	If so, use Chris's loader as a template on how to tie GRS Role- 
memberships into grouper

Why tie GRS and Grouper together:
	Unified operation (UI, auditing, membership life cycle) for both  
automatic and manual ways subjects are added to, or removed from, groups
        Temporary manual actions
	Leverage Grouper as initial place for group publishing (ldappc, group  
algebra(?), etc)