Moving to production

Once you've installed and had a good look around the quick start, you'll be ready to start setting up and instance of Grouper which contains your data, rather than sample data. Before jumping into this it's worthwhile taking some time to review what you already have in your infrastructure and to plan the integration of Grouper into it.

You should be following a structured process to progress from the quick start to a production installation of Grouper. The steps that I will be outlining are:

  1. Consider key questions about your existing environment
  2. Installation of Grouper components in development environment
  3. An iterative process of deploying, testing and improving configurations to customise core Grouper components to meet your requirements. This may include importing and exporting data. By the end of this stage you will have a set of configurations that will work for you
  4. Detailed planning process prior to deployment to a pre-production (if available) or production environment. This includes definition of tests so that you can verify that Grouper is doing what you expect
  5. Deployment and testing in (pre-)production environment
  6. Review

At this stage we are going to consider only core components of the Grouper toolkit - the database and API and the UI. Other available components (such as the web service and client) will be covered in later chapters.