Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Steven Carmody <>]

I'm seeking thoughts and experience. Let me provide some background 
information, and our current thoughts. However, I'm really looking to 
start a conversation, and hear what other people are thinking.

We've begun to walk down the road to providing departments with 
department-related groups. We're expecting to provide 1) some 
auto-magically provisioned groups using information from various 
Business systems, and 2) delegate to the department the authority to 
create and manage groups for their specific needs. Beyond that, of 
course, we have the usual range of departments, from very small to very 
large, including both administrative and academic. So there's a wide 
span of requirements and complexity.

Having spent too many years with naming hierarchies of various sorts, my 
initial inclination is to provide a small standard set of top level 
containers within each department container. Having a single flat name 
space at the top level frankly gives me a bad sort of itch; I think our 
experience with file systems, etc gives us enough hints about the types 
of groups people will want that we can make some educated guesses about 
"categories". OTOH, we don't want to over-prescribe a single framework 
on everyone, and we don't want to force a deep multi-level hierarchy on 
everyone.

We're currently thinking of this set of top level containers:

-- People (this would contain auto-provisioned groups like Faculty, 
Staff, Grad Students, Concentrators, student workers, etc). The dept 
could manage groups containing "affiliated faculty" (eg people in other 
depts who aren't official members of this dept but are considered to be 
unofficial members of this dept; some affiliates could be from other 
campuses);

This container would likely also contain groups related to the 
administrative structure of the dept. In all likelihood, these would 
have to be manually maintained by the dept.

-- Projects This would contain groups related to various Projects that 
the dept is involved with; many of these could contain people from other 
depts; research groups could contain people from other campuses. The 
dept would be authorized to manage everything in this container. We're 
assuming that a Research group would create their own container and 
namespace within this container.

-- Applications (or Services). This would contain groups that have 
various privileges within centrally-offered services (eg who can 
edit/approve changes to the dept web site on the central web server). We 
expect that each application will include a "grouper-lite-lite" GUI 
allowing an admin to browse and manage memberships relevant to this 
application. These groups are placed in a well-defined location so that 
the relevant application can find them.

-- Other (love that name...) The dept can do whatever they want within 
this container...

-- a dept can also ask us to create additional top level containers for 
their use.

-- Note that Course-related groups are placed elsewhere in the hierarchy.

So... what are other sites doing with departmentally-related groups ?