Announcing CalGroups

March 14, 2014

If you work on a project team, how do you keep track of team members so that you can send information, share files and schedule meetings? In our current environment, we typically have to create and maintain a group list in each of the different applications that support our administrative needs (such as bMail, Box, Calshare, etc.). Wouldn’t it be more efficient to create a group once and have it appear automatically in the applications we use? CalGroups is a new central group management service from IST’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) team that would allow the campus to do this and more!

Key Features

Manage Groups from One Place

Group owners can set up groups in CalGroups,  which feeds membership information to downstream applications like bMail, Box, Calshare, etc. Managing groups from one place reduces the effort in maintaining group lists across applications and improves accuracy. 

Create Groups from Authorized Data Sources

Group owners can access and use data-driven groups which are dynamically derived from authorized systems of record such as Human Capital Management and Student Information Systems. In addition, group owners can add or subtract members from these data-driven groups for their specific needs. Using data from our systems of record is not only efficient, it also improves accuracy since this data is dynamic: changes in the source systems will be reflected in these groups in real time.

Manage Access Rights to Applications

Application owners can use CalGroups to manage user access to their applications which reduces the workload of maintaining access lists in different applications.  More importantly, managing access rights using CalGroups improves security and reduces risk.

Application Integrations

CalGroups is a back-end system intended for integration with the applications in which groups will appear. Rolling out this service is a collaborative effort between the IAM team and the downstream application support teams.

Over the past year, the IAM team implemented the technical infrastructure and, working with campus stakeholders, established the basic functional design.  For its pilot, CalGroups completed a production integration with the CalMessages,  the primary campus notification service.

The IAM team is currently working with the bConnected team to implement ad-hoc groups: static groups that are manually created and maintained. The IAM team is creating a user interface for  campus members to create these groups that will be pushed to and administered as Google Groups in the bConnected Suite. After this implementation, the IAM team expects to integrate data-driven groups.

Contact 

To learn more about the CalGroups project, see CalGroups.

If you have a use case for integrating central groups with enterprise applications or want more information on CalGroups, contact calnet-admin@lists.berkeley.edu