2009-03-30 Wiki Strategy Meeting Notes

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Last updated: Mar 31, 2009 by AnonymousVersion comment
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2009-03-30 Wiki Strategy Meeting Notes

Attendees

  • Curtis Bray
  • Brian Donnelly
  • Charlie Turner
  • David Walker

Updates

  • Our project was going to be discussed at last Wednesday's IETLC meeting, but the meeting was canceled.  Whenever it is rescheduled, I will also talk about the general architectural value of managing groups outside of any of the collaboration tools, i.e., in identity management.  This should benefit Listproc and other tools used by collaborating groups.
    • It will probably still be appropriate to have tools like Sakai and Confluence to provide a user interface to group management; the repository of the groups they manage, though, would be part of the identity management service.
  • The work group that was created about a year and a half ago to look at collaboration tools like Confluence, Sakai, and Sharepoint will be starting up again.  We'll want to align ourselves with what they are doing (and vice versa).  I'll make sure they're aware of the concept of all tools sharing a common repository of group membership.

Continuation of Our Electronic Mail Discussion

We continued the electronic mail discussion in Re Quick notes from our wiki strategy meeting on Wednesday:

  • Federation
    • Confluence will be upgraded to the current version from Atlassian late in April.  It will be "Shibbolized" in May.
    • There are currently no plans to federate SmartSite, but something will have to be done, since it currently uses DistAuth for authentication.  We will encourage integration of SmartSite into Shibboleth, rather than directly to CAS when the conversion from DistAuth is done.
    • For both Confluence and SmartSite, federation will mean a change in user identifiers.  That will take some care in implementation.
      • [This wasn't discussed in the meeting, but federated identifiers must be "scoped" to provide uniqueness across all members of the federation.  InCommon uses an institution's domain name as the scope, so its identifiers look like electronic mail addresses. For example, David Walker's identifier would be dhwalker@ucdavis.edu, rather than just dhwalker.]
  • Common architecture for collaboration tools
    • All collaboration tools need to know the members of the groups that are collaborating. Many of the major tools can utilize LDAP-based group definitions. We should move in that direction.
    • Other architectural elements, such as a common repository, are nice, but are not needed by all tools (e.g., Listproc).
  • External group definitions
    • The version of Confluence that we currently use cannot use externally-defined groups, but the version to be installed in April will be able to.
    • The extent to which Sakai can utilize externally-defined groups is not clear, since there are many tools within Sakai that may affect such an architecture.  UC Merced is probably a good resource to find out about this.
    • Group management has not been explicit as a deliverable for the identity management project. It is, however, a prerequisite for role management, which is an explicit deliverable, currently estimated for Spring, 2010.
  • Potential for a Sakai-based wiki
    • Sakai 2.0's repository architecture is well-suited as a platform for a wiki.  We are not aware, however, of any plans to implement an improved wiki in Sakai 2.0.  If such a wiki were developed, however, it would be at least 1-1.5 years before it (and Sakai 2.0) would be deployed here, possibly 2-3 years.

Conclusions

  • Both Confluence and SmartSite should be federated by integrating them with Shibboleth. Once both Confluence and SmartSite are federated, users will be able to navigate between them without additional login prompts.  Group membership, however, will still be managed separately.
  • Integrated group management will take some doing but has benefits, as the external group definitions can potentially be used by multiple tools like Listproc, Adobe Connect, iTunes U, etc.  Achieving this will take a while, though.  A potential roadmap might be:
    • Spring, 2010: Group management available as an identity management service.
    • Summer, 2010: Confluence group management migrated to the new service.
    • Summer/Fall, 2010: SmartSite group management migrated to the new service. (Note that this may not be feasible.  See "External group definitions" above.)