As a wise sage so profoundly opined, “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose”. Thankfully, unlike Dylan’s unfortunate protagonist, we don’t have nothing but, like Miss Lonely, we do have nothing to lose.*

In case you haven’t yet realised (and I appreciate it might not be too obvious), I’m alluding to plans for lessening the impact of the corporate data changes in Grouper at the nominal changeover of the academic years.

Like a rolling stone gathering no moss, so PSP will carry on regardless. And thus we do not have nothing. But we know from experience that what we do have will be very slow for a while. And so we have nothing to lose by implementing a new, complementary method of synchronising group memberships between Grouper and Active Directory. After extensive testing and a few improvements, we believe we are now in the favourable position of being able to put this new solution into production.

This means that membership changes to existing Grouper groups will be reflected in AD much sooner than we would have otherwise expected. We know that this new method is going to be a lot quicker. What we do not know is exactly how long it will all take. We have not been able to test the sheer volume of group membership changes that will be required. We will endeavour to maintain lines of communication to keep anyone who is interested informed with progress.

We’re not selling any alibis and we’ve got no secrets to conceal, so I think it’s also worth mentioning what this new solution will not do: it will not create any new groups in Active Directory and it will not process changes to group names or descriptions. These will have to wait for PSP to catch up.

Also, as a spin-off from this new solution, I’ve developed a nice little means of synchronising the membership for a specific group. This should prove to be much quicker and more reliable than the existing mechanism for doing this.

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*(Sorry, I really shouldn’t write these things late at night.)