Our third principle of Grouper good practice is:

• Where adequate source data doesn’t exist to define a ‘Corporate Data’ group, create a ‘User Group’ if you’re likely to use the same set of members in more than one place.

This is a principle based around reuse, in order to save time and avoid inconsistencies and errors.

The classic example is for a research group. This fictional research group might be made up of some staff from School X, some from School Y and a few PGR students. There is nothing in our corporate data systems to identify that these people belong to this research group so we cannot create a ‘Corporate Data’ group for them.

Now, let’s say this research group wants to set up a mailing list, a wiki and a shared filestore. (These are all things that can be controlled through Grouper.) Instead of manually maintaining the membership list of three different ‘Applications’ groups, create one reusable ‘User Groups’ group which can be the member of the three ‘Applications’ groups.