Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Tom Barton <>]

Very cool!

A couple of questions, if you don't mind. Do you know how long the whole 
process takes for your production environment? Do you perform other 
updates to grouper over the same time period, or do you try to sequence 
one update process at a time?

Seeing those "True" responses from gsh made me wonder if that's 
satisfactory, or if you'd rather see a reflection of the operation that 
was successful.

If you plant a gsh operation that will fail into the process, how does 
the system respond, ie, does gsh + talend work well in that scenario?

Can talend use web services directly to reflect changes?

Thanks,
Tom


 wrote:
> 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