Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Rob Hebron <>]

Hi Everyone,

I've been using Grouper for some years now, and have been involved with 
the development team for a few months. I've suggested to a few people 
that I could best direct my contributions to the documentation, with a 
positive response. What I propose is to put together a Grouper "Book" 
with a coherent mixture of documentation and recipes for getting things 
done. It will go from an introduction, through deployment to 
advanced/new features and further development. An outline is listed 
below - it's am ambitious one, and may take some time, but I think it 
will be useful, even when still work-in-progress.

I'm proposing to "write" it on the Wiki. It will not replace existing 
documentation, but will cover the same ground, referring to (or even 
including) existing pages where relevant, while trying to fill in any 
gaps. I also propose to sync the documentation with released versions, 
exporting it and checking a frozen version into subversion alongside the 
code.

What do people think about this? Anything I've missed out that would be 
useful? Does the structure make sense? I'd particularly welcome case 
studies and experiences from sites that have implemented or are planning 
to implement Grouper as I think these really help to outline what 
Grouper can do to people who are new to it. Some of these are already up 
in the Wiki, but are there more out there?


Regards,

Rob




Grouper Book outline
====================

Introduction

* What is Grouper and what can it do?
* How could Grouper be useful to me? Typical use-cases
* What is Internet2 and where does Grouper fit into it?

Part A - Grouper core
---------------------

Case studies

* High-level write up of Grouper implementations, from business-case to 
production, including benefits and problems

Getting started

* Installing the quick start
* Starting the quickstart
* Exploring Grouper - admin and lite interfaces, terminology used, 
workflows for typical tasks

Moving to production

* Planning checklist
* Setting up and configuring an external database
* Configuring an external subject source
* Installing and running an application server
* Installing Grouper UI on the application server
* Running Grouper in production - daemon/service startup etc.
* Don't forget - backup, failover options etc

Running in production (N.B. I see this as a large section, and a good 
place for tips/tricks/scripts etc to go)

* gsh for common tasks
* Monitoring Grouper
* Querying Grouper
* Exporting from Grouper
* Management/admin tasks - daily report, cleaning subjects, cleaning 
memberships,
* Audit monitoring
* Getting help - wiki, mailing lists
* Contributed tips and code

Upgrading Grouper

* Export/Import
* Upgrading the database schema with data in-place
* Installing a fresh schema and importing data

Part B - Getting more from Grouper
----------------------------------

Web service

* Purpose
* Installation
* Running
* Testing
* Use-cases

Accessing data/provisioning from Grouper

* Provisioning
        * LDAPPC
        * LDAPPC-NG
        * Notifications
        * ESB
        * Hooks
* API/Grouper Client

Provisioning to Grouper

* API/Grouper client
* ESB
* Webservice

Other services

* Role and permission management
* Attribute framework
* Custom group types
* Rules framework (v2 feature)

Integrating Grouper (N.B/. Another cookbook

(incl. v2 features)
* Integrating into existing environments (existing LDAP groups etc.)
* Shib integration
* Federating groups
* Kuali Rice

Community contributions

* Contributed code, how-tos etc.

Part C - Deep dive into Grouper
-------------------------------

Inside Grouper

* Architecture
* Persistence with Hibernate
* UI
* Daemon - scheduled tasks

High availability

* Database availability - overview of options for different databases
* Daemon availability - example active/passive cluster running on Linux
* UI availability - example active/passive cluster running on Linux

Developing for Grouper

* Getting involved
* Mailing lists
* Bug-reporting
* Feature requests
* Contributing code
* Developer calls