Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

Hi Everyone,

Inspired by Chris’ email regarding the management of class lists using the 
grouper loader I thought I would share what we have been doing at Newcastle 
University to provision students module enrolments into Grouper.

Module information, including course details, and student enrolments for 
Newcastle University are held in a database which the Faculty of Medical 
Sciences (FMSC) holds the responsibility for. We would normally take 
advantage of the grouper loader, however due to factors including database 
permissions and some required restructuring of the data we have not been able 
to this in this scenario. We find the loader to be a very useful feature, and 
as Grouper has access to the corporate data for the University’s departmental 
structure, we are able to use the Grouper Loader to create our Organisational 
structure, which we find very beneficial to provide an up to date 
representation of the organisation. This would also be our desired route for 
the provisioning of module data into grouper, and as the IDMAPs project 
continues to develop, we hope to be able implement this in the future. 
 
As a consequence of not being able to use the loader, we needed a method of 
extracting the appropriate information from the database and then feed this 
into Grouper, the method to do this has been created using the Open Source 
data integration suite, Talend. As part of a JISC funded project, IDMAPS, we 
have recently started to using Talend to try and address the problems posed 
by data flows which are inconsistent, badly documented and hard to maintain. 

With Talend, we have been able to produce a job which allows us to extract 
the data from the FMSC’s database, manipulate the data into the required 
format, and feed this data into Grouper using the Grouper Shell, also 
allowing us to keep an audit trail of any changes made to modules and module 
enrolments. To demonstrate how we have achieved this we have created some 
videos which show the process of extracting the data from the source location 
and feeding this into Grouper, the videos can be found at 
http://research.ncl.ac.uk/idmaps/videos.php. This is the first time we have 
created videos for this purpose, and we have encountered some problems with 
the videos being temperamental at times, we have tried to overcome this by 
splitting the video into a number of parts.

Talend alone is  a very useful tool for the creation and maintainability of 
the numerous data feeds throughout an organisation, in the short time of 
using it we have already seen how it can improve the current flows of data 
throughout the University.  It is provides a quick and efficient way of 
producing data feeds to meet a systems required data rules, and allows you to 
easily augment data into one overall data flow. This was recently required to 
provision role based access control from Grouper into the Scientia Syllabus 
Plus Room Booking service, for this we needed to bring together data from 
Grouper and various SAP data sources. We are currently in the process of 
producing a video to demonstrate how we do this, and will share this in the 
near future.

I hope the videos are of some interest, 

Regards

Richard James
ISS Middleware Team
Newcastle University