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Newcastle University Welcome Page
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This page provides details of how we are using Grouper at Newcastle University, providing examples of configurations for certain the uses of some of the components of Grouper. It will also provide links to outputs from projects that Newcastle University have run which are focused around the use of Grouper.
Grouper UI 2.2 Testing April 2014: Grouper UI 2.2
Contribution from Newcastle in May 2013: Grouper InfoGraphic
Update: the service in 2016
The last 4 years have seen steady growth in the service and grouper is embedded as the default choice for group management and access control in the university.
The Grouper service is used to provide scale-able manageable access control to 23 major systems in use across the university. The Diagram below describes the integration. (FIM = Forefront identity management, SAP SLCM = student life cycle management, IDFS = Institutional data feed service).
The service was recently upgraded to version 2.2. The new functionality of real time provisioning is a welcome improvement, in particular access to team file-stores is much easier to setup and manage.
Usage summary
In order to give an idea of the scale grouper operates at in the university and the value it delivers, we have shared some service metrics.
Grouper size:
| memberships: | 795,961 |
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| groups: | 13,402 |
| members: | 59,671 |
| folders: | 760 |
Grouper use:
Average number of monthly users of the service management interface: 80
Average number of monthly logins to service management interface: 550
Average number of monthly manual changes (i.e. done by a person) to groups: 570
Average number of monthly changes to access control groups (i.e. the result of the combination manual intervention and data driven groups): 14,000
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 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 these rules are easy to write in English they are not traditionally easy to 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, this then resulted in 16,000 STEM users being granted access. Prior to using grouper manual registration had meant only around 300 users had access, post grouper 16,000 has access. As a result of the changes grouper enabled Students have downloaded over £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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This page will provide details of how we are using Grouper at Newcastle University, providing examples of configurations for certain the uses of some of the components of Grouper. and providing details of use cases for Grouper at Newcastle.
Rampart with the Grouper web services - details of the configuration involved in enabling rampart with Grouper.
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As part of project work over recent years we have produced a number of screencast videos to demonstrate the use of Grouper and also the use of the data integration tool Talend to further extend the capabilities of Grouper.
New - Structuring groups in Grouper - This video discusses how we structure groups within Grouper to improve and demonstrates how the structure works and improves the delegation of access control.
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