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The key benefit of grouper service is that is allows the university to leverage its' institutional data to deliver a manageable access control platform. 80 users being able to deliver 14,000 access control changes a month while only having to make 570 manual changes is the crux of this value. The web based interface means that many of those 80 users are non technical and could control access to their resources easily. Prior to using grouper providing access control to 23 systems would have resulted in much time consuming work for administrators, grouper has removed much of that work.
Example of business benefit "Dreamspark"
An example of how being able to easily management complex access control groups delivers real benefit is providing student access access to Microsoft Dreamspark. Microsoft provide the Dreamspark offer which enables STEM students to use most of their software for free and for Arts students to access some of Microsoft's development software for free. Staff teaching or supporting IT for those students also get access. While theses these rules are easy to write in English they are not traditionally easy to do implement in access control systems. Grouper enabled the university to setup a simple STEM access group with science students, teaching staff and IT support officers in it. We then granted access to the STEM offer based on that group. The setup involved manually adding 39 memberships to the group which , this then resulted in 16,000 STEM users being granted access. Prior to using group grouper manual registration had meant only around 300 users had access, post group grouper 16,000 has access. As a result of the changes grouper enabled Students have downloaded over £4million (~$6million in USD) worth £4 million worth of software for educational use (~$6 million in USD) . Simple, manageable, scale-able access control delivers real benefits to a university.
The story of 2012
2012 brought a number of new developments with the use of Grouper at Newcastle University.
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