Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Scott Koranda <>]

Hi,

My apology for the late reply. I was out of the office last week.

> Like a growing number of schools, we have implemented a mechanism to
> replicate group memberships from Grouper to GAE. The initial implementation
> was very basic, and will create a group in GAE, and then manage the
> membership on an ongoing basis.
>
> Initially, we were doing this with Course groups, and a small number of
> department-oriented groups. However, we're in the process of delegating to
> departments the ability and authority to create and mange groups to meet
> their local needs. We're discovering that people use groups for different
> purposes (duh ! ), and that in some cases they would like the properties of
> the target google group to be set differently from the defaults. This isn't
> really a surprise, and we expect to see the same sort of requests when we
> start replicating to AD in the next few weeks.
>
> We're interested in starting a conversation about how to address these
> requirements. We're wondering whether other campuses have started to develop
> ways to address these sorts of requirements.
>
> Looking forward to an interesting conversation !

A client (large research university) I have been working with is using a 
custom
change log consumer and some custom provisioning code that leverages
the Google Admin SDK (primarily the Directory API and Groups Settings
API) to provision
Grouper groups to Google. Both course groups and a subset of "user" groups
are being provisioned this way. At this point the Google group
settings or properties
are the same for both types of groups and there is no functionality to allow 
for
custom group settings on a per-group basis. Since we are using the
Groups Settings
API directly it would not be difficult to have per-group Google group
settings if we can get
the desired settings easily from the user/Grouper. We have not put any
thought into
that design yet but I suspect it will happen.

May I bring up a related issue? (realizing I just did...)

We are interested to know how other campuses deal with "delete" for groups, 
and
in particular course groups. In the current deployment when the course group
is removed from the SOR (LDAP in this case), the loader of course removes it
from Grouper. The custom provisioning code at this point does not call
the Directory
API 'delete' call for the group but instead uses the Groups Setting
API 'patch' call
to change the resource setting for 'archiveOnly' to 'true'. The
primary reason for doing
this is to not "lose" associated "buckets" of information that might
have accumulated
when the group was in use.

What approaches to "delete" for course groups are other campuses taking?

Cheers,

Scott K