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Re: external people as group members


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  • From: Tom Barton <>
  • To: Grouper Dev <>
  • Subject: Re: external people as group members
  • Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:45:47 -0500

<Bringing this thread back to grouper-dev because I think this topic may have broader interest.>

Is there a reason to put the registration page in the grouper UI? I bet that almost always the reason the external person is there has nothing to do with grouper, as far as they know.

What forms of external authN should the external registration page support? SAML & OpenID surely. Anything else?

Will local accounts be created, eg, username/password?

I agree with a plug-in approach for provisioning registrants, or at least having RDBMS & LDAP options. How about SPML? Is that statement even well-posed?

Tom

Shilen Patel wrote:
Hey,

Duke has been looking at doing something similar. We currently have a separate Shibboleth IdP for external people, however, right now the reason for having external people isn't for groups, but we'll probably want to assign group memberships in the near to mid term. We went with a separate IdP just to make sure that these people do not get into applications that don't do proper authorization. So instead if an application wants to allow external people, they would have to trust this external IdP. Is this an issue you see yourself having?

What I was thinking about doing is having some sort of registration page that stores the external users' identity information in our IDM. Then we would synchronize that data to our LDAP (in a different suffix that's not a child of what most people use as their base DN for searches). This would allow us to store group memberships for external people in LDAP and also allow us to use the built in LDAP subject source for them.

So I'm just thinking that if I was going to use this enhancement, I would want the registration page to be able to use the SPML interface that our IdM provides. So maybe the registration page can allow you to plugin how to get and store the identity information for the external people rather than assuming it's just a database table?

Thanks!

-- Shilen


On 4/16/10 6:08 PM, Chris Hyzer wrote:

Here is an idea to discuss at dinner:


Grouper could have another optional built in subject source for external people. This has columns for id, name, description (maybe more).


Then we have a screen in the Grouper UI where external people can sign in with shib, and add or edit their information in that table. Then group updaters can add those external people to groups. If they cant find the people to add, then they (or with the help of the Grouper UI), can send a link via email for those people to sign in and register, and when done, they can be added to the group.


At Penn we would like to have something like comanage file sharing, but we need to quicker than it seems comanage will deliver it, and I would like to use grouper, and this seems like a useful enhancement to grouper that could be used for other purposes.


If anyone knows of a good open source file sharing app (sythos and basecamp were ruled out), let me know, or if you have thoughts on the grouper enhancement let me know now or at dinner… J


Chris






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