Re: Sympa as Groups Management Tool
Warren Anderson <
warren@...>
2011-09-08 17:59:08 GMT
Hi,
I think one of the main reasons NOT to use sympa as a group management
tool is the relative difficulty in leveraging your groups in other
services. The large scientific collaboration I belong to (www.ligo.org)
uses LDAP paired with Grouper. Grouper is extremely flexible for group
management, can draw entities to group from an LDAP, and can then write
group management information into LDAP (both by writinggroup entries
into LDAP and by populating the multivalued isMemberOf attribute for
the entities in a group). Very many tools have the ability to pull
information out of LDAP without any modification (including sympa,
which is what we do). For those tools that do not, whatever language
they are written will almost surely have an LDAP module or library to
make accessing the group information relatively straightforward to
code.
Perhaps your needs are not so varied, but we require groups for ACLs
to several different brands of wiki, three different version control
systems, three brands of bug/request tracking systems, posix/unix
filesystems, grid computing (Globus) accounts, several in-house
applications, web pages, mailing lists, etc. And to further complicate
matters, our scientists use at least eight different linux distros,
solaris, OS X, and at least three flavors of MS Windows. The amount
of software we would have to write to leverage sympa groups for all of
this would have been prohibitive. But as I say, your mileage may vary.
Cheers,
Warren
On Sep 8, 2011, at 11:24 , Victoriano Giralt wrote:
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> Eileen Roach escribió:
> | We are considering using Sympa for our campus Identity Infrastructure
> | Groups Management tool -- so for groups other than mailing lists too.
> | Are there other campus's doing the same? And if so, any pros/cons that
> | we should consider?
>
> Hi Eileen, I've been toying with such an idea for some time, as it seems
> really natural to form groups around mailing lists:
>
> + The invitation system is tested in the wild and works (most of the time)
> + People are more or less accustomed to the group feeling a list gives
> + With Sympa group members can come from several "inside" sources as well
> as from the outside.
>
> So this seems like all pros :)
>
> On the other hand a group can be seen as something richer than just
> belonging to a list of subscribers. People in groups can have roles, even
> several of them. I reckon that lists also have roles, three of them in
> Sympa: owner, moderator/editor and subscriber and that you can use, so to
> say, "role lists", if you are in a given list you belong to a role, but
> them, how do you map that to a given group, for example, a class. This
> takes you into list combinatorial explosion territory.
>
> I'm working on a plugin for MoinMoin Python wiki that will use Sympa lists
> both for access control and for wiki farms (thanks to Sympa SOPA
> interface): one list -> one wiki, list role -> wiki group, bound through
> SAML asserions to the identity of the user in both systems.
>
> But there are situations where you need richer groups with richer role sets
> and then, you need a dedicated group manager, lightweight (<shameless plug>
> ~ like the work done by some of my colleagues[1][2]</shameless plug>) or
> Grouper sized[3].
>
> | Thanks in advance,
> You are welcome.
>
> [1]http://www.eunis.ie/abstracts/OAuth2Lib_JoseAlfonsoAccino-ElenaLozano_Abstract.pdf
> [2]http://www.eunis.ie/papers/OAuth2Lib_JoseAlfonsoAccino-ElenaLozano_Paper.pdf
> [3]http://www.internet2.edu/grouper/software.html
>
> - --
> Victoriano Giralt
> Systems Manager
> Central ICT Services
> University of Malaga
> SPAIN
> - -
> A: Yes.
> | > Q: Are you sure ?
> |> >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
> |>> >>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email ?
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+================[ WARREN G. ANDERSON ]====================+
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