Grouper Developers Forum

[Michael Girgis <>]

Hi everyone.

I'm interested in collecting some feedback regarding your thoughts on the 
need for multiple Grouper UIs. As you know, right now we have two UIs, the 
Admin UI and the Lite UI. As we move forward with a UI redesign, we'll need 
to decide if we're going to redesign both UIs, enhance just one or the other, 
or integrate them into one.

I'm going to take the optimistic route, and suggest that if we design a 
single interface effectively, maybe we can successfully combine both into 
one, and even reduce some overhead along the way. As I understand it, the 
most important features of the Lite UI are:

* removes excess clutter for intermediate users
* provides ability to deep link directly to a group's management screen

So perhaps as we redesign a single UI, we can pay special attention to 
providing the ability to "hide" advanced features (which is already done to 
some extent in the Lite UI). For example, we could include a tree for 
navigating folders and groups which could exist in a collapsible left column 
- since lite users may not need to access more than one group, they can leave 
this collapsed at all times. And maybe it would be possible to save some of 
those UI settings in a user's preferences or session so that she doesn't need 
to adjust things everytime she accesses the site.

Regarding deep-linking, is that not an option in the Admin UI, or is it 
mainly that the page you would link to is just not as user-friendly as in the 
Lite UI?

As I'm still very new to this project, perhaps I'm over simplifying. But I'm 
interested to know what everyone thinks.

Thanks in advance,
Michael Girgis
University of Chicago