Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Jim Fox <>]

Ours (UWash) is somewhat special.  We have a custom change log,
and a reader of that that updates a local bunch of ldaps and
writes the activity to an ActiveMQ message bus.  Another process
reads the ActiveMQ and updates Google.  Other processes also 
read the ActiveMQ.

We will in all likehood be switching the ActiveMQ to an AWS event queue.

The advantage of the message bus is not only the possibility
of multiple receivers, but the ability to disconnect one process
(reading the change log) from the others (reading the bus).

Our Google update code is 'c'.  You can use it.  The guy who
does that part is out this week.

Jim



On Mon, 22 Jul 2013, Scott Koranda wrote:

> Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 12:11:57 -0700
> From: Scott Koranda 
> <>
> To: grouper-users 
> <>
> Subject: [grouper-users] provisioning to Google Apps
>
> Hello,
>
> I am working with Boston College to develop infrastructure to
> enable them to provision course groups from their LDAP
> directory to Google Apps. Rather than writing a once-off tool
> to go directly from the directory server to Goolge Apps the
> plan is to introduce Grouper to leverage the Grouper change
> log as well as the ability to add enhanced management
> capabilities for the course groups.
>
> We expect to use the Grouper Loader to load the course group
> memberships from the LDAP directory system of record to
> Grouper.
>
> To provision from Grouper to Google Apps we are considering
> three options:
>
> - building a custom PSP connector: Tom Zeller has reported on
>   the list that he has thought in some detail about the design
>   and started to write some code but it is not finished (and
>   shelved I presume).
>
>   Given that the Grouper team has recently signaled that the
>   PSP will not be evolved due to the lack of takeup for SPML
>   we think this is the least attractive path.
>
> - building a custom Grouper change log consumer: the change
>   log consumer code would extend ChangeLogConsumerBase and
>   then leverage the Google Directory API Java client library.
>
>   If anybody has written such a change log consumer and can
>   share it we would be grateful to hear about it.
>
>   Given the current project scope we think this is the most
>   attractive path.
>
> - building a custom Grouper change log consumer to provision
>   changes to a message bus/queue, and then write a custom
>   queue client against the Google Directory API to provision
>   into Google: this approach is much like the above one but
>   introduces the message bus/queue as a mediator rather than
>   provisioning into Google directly. The primary attraction of
>   this approach is that it provides extra flexibility to
>   introduce more clients later so that more that just Google
>   could be provisioned. The down side is introducing another
>   layer and making the infrastructure more complex.
>
>   Brown and the University of Washington appear to have taken
>   this approach. Are either able to share code?
>
> Are there other approaches we should consider?
>
> Any thoughts about the relative ranking of the three
> approaches?
>
> Other than the Google Apps throttling, are there other issues
> people have run into and that we should consider?
>
> Thank you in advance for any input you have.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Scott Koranda