Happy New Year from the Grouper Project! An Email List Use Case, Community Contributions, Upcoming Training, and More

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

By Chris Hyzer, University of Pennsylvania

As we start 2024, it’s exciting to see the sustained energy around Grouper and the many outstanding community contributions. Last year  was an important one for the Grouper project. We made huge strides on the provisioning framework and on Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC), and we kicked off a documentation improvement effort.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, including those who attended the Grouper BOF and other Grouper sessions at the Internet2 Technology Exchange in Minneapolis in September 2023. See the photo and check out the slides from the TechEx Grouper BOF, featuring an overview of our roadmap.

Our roadmap is based on community input. Grouper, the access management component of the InCommon Trusted Access Platform, evolves to meet the community’s needs. 

An Email List Use Case

I’m pleased to share a use case from the University of Pennsylvania that leverages some of Grouper’s new features to improve the way email lists are handled.

At Penn we use LSoft Listserv for email lists. We recently had a project to make it easier to manage automated lists and to improve deprovisioning of list owners and members.  Using Grouper to solve these problems has allowed us to address the shortcomings of the previous service while using new features of the Grouper platform. 

There are four email list roles that we are tracking in Grouper: owners, quiet owners, senders, and members. To make this easier to explain, we will just discuss owners and members in the use case, but the quiet owners and senders have similar characteristics as owners. Not to mention the typical goal of retiring bespoke unmaintainable perl scripts! Read the use case.

Thanks to Our Community

Sharing of use cases and other resources keeps our community thriving. 

• Many thanks to the community members who have stepped up to help with the Grouper documentation improvement effort, being led by Nicolette Stout of Idaho State University. This work is being tracked on the Grouper documentation wiki page. 

• Thanks to the team at University of Michigan, who developed a presentation on Grouper and ABAC.

Contributing to the Community

• We appreciate all our community partners who have provided use cases and testing.  Please check out the community contributions page here. 
• Please email Emily Eisbruch emily@internet2.edu if you’d be willing to share a new Grouper contribution. 

Join us for Grouper Training 

Online Grouper training  is a great opportunity to learn about Grouper, including the Grouper Provisioning Framework. 

• This training is useful for those new or experienced with Grouper. 
• The next Grouper training is March 12 -15, 2024, and we would love to see you.
• Register by February 6 for early bird rates.  

Thanks!

Chris Hyzer, Grouper lead

ICYMI

• Major Improvements to the Grouper Provisioning Framework

• Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) with Grouper: Questions & Answers