Getting Started with Grouper at U-M

The U-M Grouper production environment is ready and available for use by university employees who manage access to university services, want to improve their current access management processes, and have a use case that fits within Grouper’s current capabilities.

How to get started with Grouper:

  1. Confirm your use case fits within Grouper’s current capabilities. If Grouper does not meet your use case or you would like to find out if future updates to Grouper would meet your use case (e.g., additional data source), complete this form to provide more information. Someone from the ITS-Grouper at U-M team will respond to your questions.
  2. Complete the DCE101 U-M Data Protection and Responsible Use course in My LINC to ensure you understand the responsible use of institutional data. If you previously completed the course, you do not need to take it again.
  3. Complete the  ITSE107 Introduction to Grouper at U-M training. 
  4. Complete the Grouper Request Form if you have a use case that will work with Grouper and are ready to get access.

U-M Grouper is not the right access management tool for you if:

  • Your access control management is ad hoc. You cannot define a policy that states who should have access and when they should lose access.
  • You need membership of the Grouper access policy group to sync to somewhere other than the Active Directory or eDirectory.
  • You want to manage some of your service’s access control outside of Grouper and need membership to sync back to the access policy group in Grouper.
  • You need the target group to be composed of nested groups. Grouper only provisions flat memberships and is unable to provision to a nested target group. However, having Grouper as the source of truth for membership should eliminate the need for nested groups in a target.

If Grouper does not meet your use case or you would like to find out if future updates to Grouper would meet your use case (e.g., additional data source), complete this brief form to provide more information and to receive a response from the ITS-Grouper at The U-M team.