Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Tom Barton <>]

Gabby Capitanchik wrote:
> 1) What IDMs are people using? Are people creating their own or using a 
> third party product (e.g. Kuali)

Leading technologies in U Chicago's IdM operation include a home-grown 
"person registry" that runs on MS SQL Server, Sun's JES LDAP servers, 
Active Directory, shibboleth, and grouper. Integration among them is 
accomplished variously, using perl & VB scripts, java applications, and 
styles of web services.

Our grouper deployment does not yet provision groups into AD, but that's 
up soon on the todo list.

> 2) What are the most common issue with integrating Grouper with an IDM?

We've had some performance issues with presenting our person registry as 
a subject source to grouper. Probably a combination of the DB being 
under-resourced and its schema not being terribly well-suited to this 
style of use.

The tougher implementation issues aren't related to systems integration, 
though. Once you have the capability to manage loads of groups, how to 
use that capability to solve actual problems presents many challenges. 
For instance, we'd like to make it easy for all staff, say, to set up a 
mailing list, some shared file space, and a calendar group to support 
project-based activity. One group being used in several applications. 
That's hard, and group management is the least of the problems.

Tom