Hi Chris, It's great to hear from you, and I'm incredibly glad that you're able to be involved in the uPortal-Grouper integration work. I agree that adding write support to the Chicago GroupStore implementation would be a fantastic next step. uPortal is indeed interested in potentially offloading some or all of our groups management off to uPortal, and that's something we've discussed publicly in community calls and roadmap presentations. Even if Grouper doesn't implement PAGS-like group services any time in the near future, it would still be worth thinking about moving some of our local database groups to Grouper.
Another uPortal-Grouper integration project worth mentioning is that done by Northern Arizona University. From what I understand, they wrote a uPortal IChannel that allowed students to administer their own Grouper-persisted groups through the portal. I don't know much about the technical implementation of that channel, so I'm not sure if they used the web services client or created a write implementation of the group store interface. Andrew pointed out that we should also think about whether we want to use some of the Grouper permissions from the portal. Once we had a write-capable Grouper group store, it might make sense to allow administration of Grouper groups based on Grouper permissions. I don't know much about Grouper's permissions, but it sounds like it might be appropriate to consider creating a Grouper implementation of the uPortal permissions store service. For those who aren't aware, we're currently in the process of updating uPortal's administrative tools for user and group management. While this work isn't expected to impact the groups and permissions APIs at the current time, I'm hoping that it makes the portal's groups and permissions capabilities more transparent and interesting to administrators. We eventually might also have the opportunity to make changes that better support delegated permissions, such that use cases like that of NAU can be supported by uPortal out of the box. I'm also hoping that whatever we all collaborate on will be able to meet the needs of ESUP-Portail. Alain and Raymond, it's wonderful to hear from you, and I'll have to apologize for the fact that I speak no French at all. I'm looking forward to working with you all, and I think the Grouper integration will be a most welcome addition to uPortal. - Jen On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Chris Hyzer <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey, > > > > I’m Chris Hyzer from the University of Pennsylvania and on the Grouper > development team, and I am interested in coding a uPortal-Grouper > integration module. > > > > I spoke with Andrew Petro at the Internet2 conference yesterday about this > and he suggested I write the dev list to see if people have input. > > > > My plan is to start with Chicago’s uPortal-Grouper implementation which I > heard is readonly, and add some update functionality. We can see how well > that works, and from there see what else can be handled by Grouper. There > are some gaps between uPortal’s group functionality and what is offered out > of the box by Grouper (e.g. attribute driven dynamic memberships, text file > driven group lists, etc), so we can address things like that to see if it is > a requirement and if we can enhance Grouper to support it (these two sound > either useful or easy to do with Grouper). It has been mentioned that if > this integration works well, and if uPortal wants to get out of the Group > business that Grouper could be shipped with uPortal similar to how CAS is. > I know this might sound controversial to some people, so let’s see how it > goes and think about how this might work and if we want to do it. > > > > I believe Jen Bourey is expecting to provide support for me, and I might be > asking the list for help as well especially since I am new to uPortal. J > > > > I am wrapping up a release of Grouper now and hope to start development on > this in a month or more. I thought I would throw this out now if there is > discussion around it. > > > > Thoughts? Questions? Advice? > > > > Thanks! > > Chris > > > > -- > > You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: > [email protected] > To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see > http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/uportal-dev > > -- Jen Bourey -- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/uportal-dev
