COmanage-Dev Call 12-Dec-08
*Attending*
Heather Flanagan, Stanford (chair)
Jim Leous, The Pennsylvania State University
Chris Hubing, The Pennsylvania State University
Tom Barton, U. Chicago
Digant Kasundra, Stanford
Scotty Logan, Stanford
John Robertson, Stanford
Dave Donnelly, Stanford
RL "Bob" Morgan, U. Washington
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Emily Eisbruch, Internet2 (scribe)
*New Action Items*
[AI] (Scotty) will move documentation on how to create the VM from the internal Stanford wiki to the COmanage wiki on spaces.at.internet2.edu.
[AI] (Ken, SteveO, and Digant) will update the COmanage website.
[AI] (Ken) will get product names from the Dutch collaboration report.
[AI] (Chris) will investigate what is involved in domesticating JIRA.
[AI] (Heather) will record action items from COmanage calls as JIRA tasks.
*Carry Over Action Items*
[AI] (Digant and Scotty) will ask OOI again if Drupal -- instead of Alfresco -- is acceptable for content management.
[AI] (Scotty) will send out to the group a list of APIs for the Domestication Guide.
[AI] (Bob) will send links to the group on the invitation problem.
[AI] (Digant) will write up how to integrate with setup wizard for the Domestication Guide.
[AI] (Ken) will ping Frank Siebenlist from Argonne National Laboratory, who is interested in COmanage.
[AI] (Digant) will create COmanage video #2, when the improved Collabmin GUI is available.
[AI] (Scotty and Digant) will redo COmanage video #1 to correct a few audio issues.
*Discussion*
COmanage Status
Digant reported that the COmanage development team has been moving along:
- The COmanage dashboard is coming together.
- Sympa and Drupal integration with COmanage is complete.
- Confluence integration with COmanage is almost done.
- A lot of testing and "hacking" is underway.
The team intends to have a beta version ready by the end of 2008. It will be a version people can play with and build applications on. This may not be a version that is totally ready for deployment of actual projects. The hope is that a lot of feedback on the beta release will be received, which will inform future development.
VM Status
Scotty reported that they are still building the VM manually.
He recently did upgrades on the virtual infrastructure tools. Now it's possible to right-click and make the virtual appliance. This will work on everyone's desktop version of VMware. It can be imported on ESX as well, so it's possible to make one image that works for everyone.
Scotty will make this new VM version available to the Penn State group for early evaluation.
[AI] (Scotty) will move documentation on how to create the VM from the internal Stanford wiki to the COmanage wiki on spaces.at.internet2.edu
Ken's Report
Ken and Jim Leous met briefly with NSF OCI leadership at the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting, who was dealing with a request from the Obama transition team on possible research spending initiatives. Ken and Jim continued the conversation with the new NSF program officer overseeing Internet2 Middleware-related projects they sponsored. COmanage was mentioned, but there was not a chance to do a demo. They will engage further in the future.
There was a lot of interest in COmanage at the European meetings in Utrecht in early December. Ken forwarded a contact to Tom and Digant of a person leading the Dutch federation in building collaboration platforms. There was a study in Dutch (not yet translated into English) of 8 or 9 projects addressing collaboration platforms. But COmanage is perceived as being furthest along and also has the added advantage of leveraging Grouper.
[AI] (Ken) will get product names from the Dutch collaboration report.
The GFIVO (Newcastle group) project in the UK has been working with Grouper to apply it to federated groups. That group will be interested in looking at COmanage at a broad level.
The interest in many quarters in learning about COmanage raises questions on how to manage the dev list when the COmanage Beta release is ready.
Ken spoke with the Foodle (federated Doodle) people. They have no plans to move Foodle out of simpleSAMLphp to a regular Shibboleth installation. However, they do have a use case for Foodle to use external group management, rather than an internal mechanism, for identifying members of a calendaring process. So some alignment around Foodle in the Shibboleth/COmanage space is worth looking at further. The Mellon Foundation is also aware of this, and there may be some interest from them in supporting work in this area.
Ken noted that federation and externalization are starting to be thought of together.
The COmanage website needs some updating, including being sure, if possible, that the forthcoming demo comes up when one googles "COmanage demo."
[AI] (Ken, SteveO, and Digant) will update the COmanage website.
The need to update COmanage video 2 and video 3 was mentioned, with the understanding that first priority for Digant right now is development work.
Channels are open for working on the COmanage GUI with the Fluid folks, but that work has not begun yet.
Ivy Plus
Heather announced that the Ivy Plus Infrastructure Team is interested in COmanage. Their next meeting is at Brown University in May.
Implementing JIRA in COmanage
Chris asked if there are plan to implement JIRA as a part of COmanage. An issue is that JIRA can do external authentication and can do external groups. But JIRA can't do both at same time unless external authorization is also LDAP.
[AI] (Chris) will investigate what is involved in domesticating JIRA.
Limiting Groups for an Application
Tom raised the question of how to limit which groups are available/presented for an application. There may be cases when there are many groups, far more than should be listed in a UI.
The group agreed it will be important to have control over the view each application has on the groups in LDAP, but this has not yet been implemented.
Online Demo/Test Instance
SteveO mentioned the benefits of having a test instance of COmanage (perhaps on online demo) that could be experimented with. It was agreed that this would be a good marketing and outreach tool to work on sometime in 2009.
Action Items in JIRA
[AI] (Heather) will record action items from COmanage calls as JIRA tasks.
Emily Eisbruch, Technology Transfer Analyst
Internet2
emily@internet2.edu
office: +1734-352-4996 | mobile +1-734-604-5562
Imagination. Collaboration. Innovation.
May your New Year be filled with Discovery!
http://www.Internet2.edu/NewYear2009/