With the new academic year fast approaching, we were hoping to be able to avoid a return of the delays in Grouper to Active Directory provisioning we’ve suffered for the last two years. Salvation seemingly lay in the hands of Grouper’s next generation provisioning technology but, following a saga longer than a pod race and more twisted than Darth Vader’s mind, we’ve concluded that PSP-NG is still not quite production-ready.

But was that our last hope? No, there is another.

I’ve recently begun working on something I’d been thinking about for a while. It’s not a replacement for the PSP technology but I believe it can complement it and significantly alleviate the impact of the inevitable provisioning backlog at the start of September.

Using Talend, the force behind much of the Institutional Data Feed Service, I plan to interrogate the Grouper change log to find out which groups that are provisioned to AD have had membership changes. Then, for each of those groups, I can query the Grouper database to find the complete current membership list for those groups. After a bit of jiggery-pokery, I can then push the full list of members into the corresponding group in AD.

More testing is required but I’m confident that this will be a good addition to our resistance to the problem; perhaps the most powerful weapon in our arsenal of workarounds.

This is just a prequel; you can expect the next episode before the end of the month, where we will let you know whether or not we are in a position to make this new weapon fully operational.