Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Tom Barton <>]

Bill,

Sorry it took me so long to respond...

The grouper community and the grouper toolkit is strong and growing, and 
the grouper project continues to enjoy enthusiastic and substantial 
material support by Internet2, InCommon, Jasig, JISC, the Kuali 
Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and campuses and other 
adopters internationally. We will be here.

Signet, Grouper, and Shibboleth are projects initiated by MACE, a group 
of campus IT architects that helps steer the Internet2 Middleware 
Initiative. MACE decided to end the Signet project because of lack of 
adoption. We'd failed to ensure that an incremental path was available 
to campuses to help them progress towards implementation of Signet's 
advanced privilege management capabilities.

MACE's investigation into and development of advanced privilege 
management capabilities for campus use has continued. The MACE-paccman 
working group was formed to provide a venue in which major open source 
projects and campus IT architects could discuss issues and identify 
common needs related to privilege and access management. And the Grouper 
project added role and privilege management capabilities to its roadmap 
as a means of providing an incremental path to campus adoption of those 
capabilities. Much of that part of the roadmap is implemented in v1.6, 
though there's still much more work to be done.

I hope this addresses your question!

Tom


 wrote:
> Dear Grouper Users,
>
> We've been using an LDAP (Oracle OID) for Oracle's single sign on
> product for a several years now.  Over that time there has been
> a steady increase in general authentication services for misc
> applications against this LDAP as well.  (It is only used for
> authentication, not white pages.)
>
> At this point we think we are ready to start looking at
> implementing groups in our LDAP.  Our need for having groups is
> only starting to emerge so we want to be ahead of the curve and
> make sure we implement a well designed and organized system from
> the start, rather than letting it grow organically.
>
> I'm trying to educate myself about groups in general and so far
> have read about half of "Practices in Directory Groups" and am
> finding it very helpful.
>
> One question I have is about Signet.  It is often mentioned in
> document titles in association with Grouper.  I looked up Signet
> and found that this privilege management system project has been
> abandoned by Internet2 and I am curious as to why.  I tried to
> find out more but have not had any luck.  The Signet project
> status page says that the mailing lists continue to be available,
> so I thought I'd check the archives, but it looks like the Signet
> lists have been removed from the Internet2 mailing list server.
>
> So can anybody briefly tell me why Signet was dropped?  What
> impact if any this has on Grouper?  What are the odds of the
> Grouper project also being abandoned by Internet2?
>
>                                                     ...BC