• Where can I find the answer to technical questions?
• Why should I use groups in my IAM infrastructure?
• What problems does Grouper solve?
• Who manages all of these groups?
• How does Grouper enhance collaboration?
• How does Grouper help the IT staff?
• What do I need to have in place?
• Where can I find more information about identity management?
  

Where can I find the answer to technical questions?
A good place to start is the technical FAQ on the Grouper wiki.

Why should I use groups in my IAM infrastructure?
Using groups in the identity and access management infrastructure adds important contextual information about an individual's formal and informal affiliations with the institution. For instance, separate applications may use groups to track each individual's role(s). If an individual is in a particular group, the person is authorized to access the resource.

What problems does Grouper solve?
Without a group management tool, implementation of groups is managed separately for each service. Keeping the membership roster consistent across multiple applications becomes very difficult and inconsistencies are the rule. If a member leaves a project, for example, the group's email list, wiki space, calendar, research database, and other shared resources need to be updated separately. Grouper solves this problem by centralizing group information in one place.

Who manages all of these groups?
With Grouper, individuals across campus manage the memberships of the groups they steward. Grouper keeps the group membership decisions in the hands of the business/group owners, access control in the hands of the application owners, and the technology management in the hands of the technologists. Schools, departments and even project leads and students can use an institutionally-tailored interface to manage their groups using plain language they understand.

How does Grouper enhance collaboration?
In Grouper, a researcher might create a "my-research-project" group and enable the members to participate on an email list, calendar group, web site, and so on. Alternatively, students could use Grouper to set up and manage "my-business-course-cohorts" to enable similar collaborative applications. The software enables group management on an individual level and empowers people to use more secure, robust, and responsive methods to control access to their resources.

How does Grouper help the IT staff?
After integrating Grouper with your identity management system, you will have a way to manage the membership of roles and other functions that individuals have with the institution. Further, automatic change or revocation of service can be accomplished based on group membership changes. Removing IT from the middle of managing groups will help ease your helpdesk headaches, as well. As more and more systems use Grouper, the benefits accrue and become more valuable.

What do I need to have in place?
To implement Grouper, you need to have:

• an institutional identity management system and a model for how privilege management fits in.
• a good relationship with key stakeholders across campus to develop the policy and business rules associated with groups and related authority issues.
• the resources to implement and support the model.

Where can I find more information about identity management?
To get started with identity management infrastructures, refer to Internet2's NSF-funded project, NMI-EDIT (www.nmi-edit.org), which offers roadmaps, practice papers, articles, and other tools to get you going.