Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Tom Barton <>]

I'll reply first with my UChicago hat on, then secondly with my grouper hat.

UChicago currently reflects several org hierarchies maintained in
traditional business systems into grouper to support a variety of access
management needs: HR-defined departments, financially-defined
departments, and courses, using the grouper loader as Chris described.
They are often used as a starting point for identifying groups of users
that should be given specific access permissions, rather than as the
final word. Not surprising, as they were each developed to support a
specific purpose and new access scenarios are beyond those purposes.
Grouper helps us leverage these org groups in new ways mainly by its
distributed administration and group math capabilities.

UChicago will also soon house a new org structure in grouper as its SoR,
ie, as a registry for them. This hierarchy is being defined by
representatives from the ~400 departments that comprise the university
and so expresses a social computation of who we are, closely allied to
what people do and who they work with rather than with where their
paychecks are paid from, for example. Grouper's attribute framework will
allow us to capture attributes for each element in this new hierarchy,
as a registry must.

Now with my grouper hat on, and thinking about a project to build a new
org hierarchy registry product, my expectation is that grouper's
existing technical capabilities would meet most functional requirements
of an org hierarchy management system. One it certainly won't meet is
having a UI that's all about org hierarchy management. But that may be
the only significant gap.

Tom

On 1/11/2012 1:08 PM, RL 'Bob' Morgan wrote:
> At a recent event it was mentioned by someone who is involved with Kuali 
> Rice that there is an investigation happening into a prospective new Rice 
> component that would be called "Kuali Organization Management" (KOM).  As 
> with most other things Kuali, the current notion is to start with an 
> existing university-developed system and expand on it.  In this case that 
> system is from Michigan State University, known there as "Organization of 
> Interest".  Here is an entry point for info about that system:
>
>    http://ebs.msu.edu/OOI/index.htm
>
> The descriptions are understandably MSU-local (old and new org codes, etc) 
> but I think people can get the general idea of scope and function: 
> management of entries for organizations, relationships among them 
> (hierarchical and otherwise), interesting business-related attributes, 
> etc.  Typical registry stuff.
>
> At that above-mentioned event, a knowledgable person said:  gee, Grouper 
> can do all those things.  How about that, we all said.  Very cool.
>
> As I look through Grouper docs, ie the stuff in
>
>   https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/Administration+Guides
>
> I'm not seeing anything obvious about using Grouper for this 
> functionality.  Perhaps I missed something.
>
> So my questions are:
>
>   Are there docs on using Grouper for an org registry service?
>
>   Is any Grouper site out there actually doing this, or planning to?
>
> Thanks,
>
>   - RL "Bob"
>