Using Sympa as a VO Group Manager

October 07, 2009, 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM

UTC/GMT -5 hours (CDT)

Location: Bowie A/B

Serge Aumont , Comité Réseau des Universités
David Verdin , Comité Réseau des Universités

Session Abstract The CRU is providing a set of groupware tools, as a service, to distributed communities (also known os VOs) among the French Higher Education. CRU has gained a valuable experience while operating this service over the last 15 years. The service is now offered to 240.000 users belonging to 840 VOs. The Sympa project was born to provide the first set of tools for these groups. Today the set of groupware tools has been extented above a simple mailing list service : shared document repository, wiki, surveying and in a near future XMPP chat. Making a coherent service out of separate tools requires some glue between the components. The authentication relies on Shibboleth to make the users use their own institution's login service. Authorization requires that these tools will query a central group repository ; Sympa acts as this group repository. Sympa software delegates group management to mailing list owners, with advanced features to import LDAP groups. VOs group repository offers two APIs for client applications : a SOAP interface and an LDAP interface. The LDAP interface was recently added to Sympa : many groupware software are already LDAP-aware and can be integrated for VOs benefit without any code change.

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