Group Practices Survey 
email response from Brendan Bellina, University of Notre Dame du Lac
August 6, 2001

I appreciate the chance to examine this survey and wish we were far enough along 
in our Enterprise Directory implementation to provide solid answers.  Instead 
all I can say is that currently we have neither groups nor roles defined, 
although I hope to begin tackling that in the spring.  I anticipate defining 
groups dynamically, allowing small special-interest groups to be created and 
joined via self-service, while official University groups would probably be 
managed by the appropriate administrative departments, and eventually defining 
roles and implementing role-based access controls (maybe RBAC, maybe not, not 
sure).  Official student groups will probably require a faculty or staff sponsor 
and all groups would be reviewed periodically so that stale groups are 
appropriately retired.  Sorry I cannot provide solid information, we just aren't 
there yet.


Tom Barton then wrote: I'm curious: what applications are likely to be the first 
one(s) to force you to implement some type of groups?

Response:  We use IBM's WebSphere for web applications development and it is my 
understanding that WebSphere likes to use groups to facilitate 
authentication/authorization.  For right now we have everyone in the campus 
community in one group which meets WebSphere's immediate needs, but we'll be 
looking into better ways to go on that.  I'm not aware of anything beyond that 
yet.