If you’re reading this you’re probably already aware that we have been suffering from a delay in provisioning group memberships from Grouper to AD. Those of you with long memories may recognise that this kind of thing has happened before, at the academic year switch over, in 2016.

First, the good news: this backlog is not as severe as we experienced in September last year. In fact, I’ve updated my chart to prove it! At the time of writing this, I expect the backlog to be cleared completely over the weekend.

Chart showing monthly updates to Grouper groups, by stem, from March 2016 to August 2017

The spike in July 2017 that caused the backlog is due to an unusual level of activity in preparation for the reorganisation of the SAgE faculty, on 31st July. It’s also worth remembering that there is only 2 days of data included in the August bar.

Now for the bad news: we are likely to experience another substantial delay in AD provisioning at the start of September.

We’re still hopeful of being able to upgrade Grouper to use it’s new provisioning technology and avoid any kind of backlog but we are fearful that the new technology is not quite production-ready yet. This is something that Michael and I are working on at the moment, with some help from the Grouper developers.

If we can’t solve this problem with an upgrade, we’ll mitigate the impact as best we can. You’ll hear more soon.