COmanage FAQ

1. What is a Collaborative Organization (CO)?
2. What is COmanage?
3. What applications can COmanage help manage?
4. How long does it take to have an application manageable by COmanage?
5. What does completely reconfigurable mean?
6. What is a Virtual Organization (VO)?
7. What does COManage offer a VO?
8. What is the future of COmanage?
9. Are there places where I can use COmanage without having to set it up myself?

1. What is a Collaborative Organization (CO)?

A Collaborative Organization is any group of the community that wants to use on-line collaboration tools among themselves in an effective manner.  An organization at any level can consider itself as a CO:

1. A group of users on campus who share calendars, and use a wiki to archive their work
2. A national group of scientists in a specific discipline, who have an access-controlled file share, a listserv, and a once-a-month videoconference
3. A university that wants to broadly support their faculty, students and staff in their national collaborations through participation in a federation and their local activities through calendaring, blogspace, IM, and other tools.
4. A national organization, such as IEEE or Internet2, might want to offer services that allows its members to collaborate on common efforts, such as wikis and email lists for WG, audioconferencing facilities,  etc.

Members of a CO belong to some enterprise security domain using federating software technology.

2.  What is COmanage?

COmanage is a veneer – a set of GUI’s, underlying infrastructure, and “intellectual constructs” – that allow users to manage many of the identity-oriented requirements of common collaboration tools. It allows one to pick an identity and associated attributes to provide to a tool, permits users to manage their groups (including domain science collaborators, class lists, etc) and assign privileges to individuals and groups (such as who can view calendars, add names to an email list, edit wiki pages, etc.). While a CO is intended to try and meet the needs of these various collaborative applications, to date we have been able to quickly enable a mailing list manager, a web server, Wikis and an open source web conferencing system.  Application integration is the key to making a CO useful to students, researchers and beyond.

3.  What applications can COmanage help manage?

The identity management of many applications, including most collaboration applications, are amenable to use with COmanage.  COmanage is designed to use connectors that can drive the outputs to applications.  A critical first connector – storing the outputs in a directory – allows many properly engineered directory enabled applications to be served with COmanage.  We will maintain a list of applications that have been fitted into COmanage.

In addition, it is anticipated that COmanage will be used to manage the identity aspects of domain science applications, including the ability to access or calibrate remote instruments, operate network sensors, and control grid-based resources.

4. How long does it take to have an application manageable by COmanage?

It can take hours to years depending on the application and how well it works with standard middleware infrastructure.  It also depends on who owns the application and how integrated one wants the application to be.

5.  What does completely reconfigurable mean?

COmanage is being built using all open source components, communicating via open protocols.  It is highly modular, designed so that the components can be replaced (by open or proprietary replacements). Those components can be located almost anywhere in a support chain, from individual and departmental to enterprise, federated and national level locations.  The user sees a consistent veneer, while the plumbing underneath can shift over time.  The only way the user sees changes is that capacities might increase as the plumbing evolves.  For example, group management tools may at first may be applied only to the CO groups one has, but then adds, over time,  management of class groups, authorized to have keys to the lab group, and the group of those entitled to access the file store. Integration changes involving the university and its departments, in addition to the CO, are exhibited as new capacities within the group management veneer.

6. What is a Virtual Organization (VO)? 

A VO is a collaborative organization that is focused around a particular domain science and usually uses significant resources (computers, storage, networks, etc.) beyond collaboration tools. Often, these additional resources have substantial authorization requirements, stemming from federal guidelines, audit standards, etc.

7.  What does COManage offer a VO?

Initially, COmanage can support the general collaboration needs of the VO, providing list servs, shared file stores, access-controlled wikis, etc.  But it is the designed, if currently unfunded, intent to extend COmanage to the identity-oriented needs of the domain science applications.  Access to data sets, control of remote instruments, management of digital repositories, even permissions for use of grant funds are all feasible using the Comanage tools of group and privilege management.

8.  What is the future of COmanage?

COmanage is designed as a catalytic agent as well as a code base.  It is intended to demonstrate the need and value of consistent user management of the identities, groups and privileges across collaboration applications and more broadly.  It is clear that many important applications, particularly enterprise business systems, have their own embedded tools and approaches.  COmanage can be used to populate tables that feed those applications, but the applications may want to call out to external group and privilege services. For such needs, API’s will need to be developed for COmanage services.

COmanage as an open source code base and development effort is partially funded by the National Science Foundation with additional support from Internet2. The intent is to build broad interest and support in the work and have it move to a broad and distributed development effort. At the same time, as application developers begin to code to group and privilege API’s for services delivered through an enterprise bus, the need for COmanage itself levels off, at least in a catalytic role.

9. Are there places where I can use COmanage without having to set it up myself?

Not yet, though we are hopeful of service centers provisioning such services.

NOTE WELL: All Internet2 Activities are governed by the Internet2 Intellectual Property Framework.