This is a sample planning guide for Grouper Installation and Deployment, with content contributed by New York University. It is intended to provide a framework as you are getting started implementing Grouper at your site. There are three primary stages :
- Planning
- Install/Test/Roll-out
- Developing Integration Materials
I - Planning Stage
Gain a basic understanding of Grouper
- Review Grouper introductory/overview documentation...
- Imagine how you expect Grouper to fit into your identity and application architecture
- (Install Grouper in a test environment to familiarize yourself with Grouper...)
Set initial goals
Establish a set of specific goals for your initial project.
- Are you planning an exploratory investigation of Grouper for possible future use, or have you settled on implementing Grouper in production for, at least, an initial set of purposes?
- What applications or application uses will be integrated with Grouper?
- What Grouper software components need to be installed for initial use?
- Will Grouper to manage ALL your groups, or will some group data be managed by other means?
- Do you have existing groups data and groups management software from which you need to migrate?
- Can you install, and begin to use, Grouper in phases?
Plan hardware and software environments
- What Grouper environments will you initially install? A development instance? A test (Q/A) instance? A production instance? All three or just one or two?
- For your software environments, what host machines will you run on? What ports will be used, what firewall settings might need to be made?
- Will you run Grouper software "as root" or as another user?
Plan groups data hierarchy and naming
- What basic categories of groups do you wish to manage? (e.g. classes, committees, workgroups, groups that share an entitlement, major subsets of your community, such as students/freshman/faculty/IT staff, etc. etc. etc.)
- Determine a basic stem / folder structure that supports two or more initial categories of groups.
- Determine your groups naming scheme.
- Flat or bushy?
Determine application and data components to use
The Grouper software consists of a number of major application and data components, not all of which you may wish to install and run from the beginning....
- What database (existing or new) will form your Grouper database repository?
- What database (existing) will provide you with subject data
- Do you plan to replicate groups data out to LDAP or some other database?
- Do you plan to automate groups management (for some or all groups) based on one or more data sources (and using the Grouper Loader)?
- Should you use just an application server or an application server + web server to enable web access?
- Which interfaces to groups data do plan to initially implement and support? Web browser access? Web services access? Grouper shell access? How do you expect end-users and applications to interface for read-only and for read-write purposes to groups data?
- Security considerations (e.g. wheel group)
II - Installation, Testing, Rollout
Sketch out your actual installation, testing, and rollout process, including:
- Confirm access to hardware/software environments, data sources and destinations
- Outline steps for installation and configuration of Grouper software elements
- Finalize initials stems/folders to create, authentication approach, initial groups to create and populate
- Plan basic testing of functionality
- Plan for ongoing operations, considering your desired approach to such duties as
- Monitoring / Management / Maintenance
- Support for Application developers/managers integrating their apps with Grouper
- Support for any end-users
- Plan to document your installation and configuration as your go along
Install & Test
III - Develop integration materials
Develop documentation, sample code, examples for use by app developers who wish to integrate their software with your Grouper installation.