[ome-users] User management (LDAP and notifications)

[Paulo Almeida]

Hi Chris,

My ultimate goal is to automate user management (creation, deletion) and 
interaction (e-mail to all, for instance) as much as possible, by integrating 
it in the institute's infrastructure. I have now talked this over with our IT 
department and they seem to be open to the idea of creating an OmeroUser 
attribute in the institute's LDAP server, which would solve most of our 
problems. The LDAP server has e-mail information, so it would be trivial to 
write a script to e-mail everyone.

The only part missing is mapping our institute's groups to Omero groups, which 
could be done using an LDAP attribute, but I understand it is not easy. I 
don't know much about LDAP, but it seems to be very open regarding semantics 
and structure, so maybe it's not possible to come up with a general solution 
that would fit every situation. In our case, for instance, it would be ideal 
to not only have an LDAP attribute determining the group, but also to use 
only part of the value to name the group (our attribute is "o:" and the value 
is something like "Unit: Technicians", so I would like to strip the "Unit:" 
part from the Omero group).

It's true that I can probably work around this problem by playing with the Web 
Interface, I will look into that.

Thanks,
- Paulo


On Wednesday 04 June 2008 10:43, you wrote:
> On 28 May 2008, at 14:57, Paulo Almeida wrote:
> > Hello,
>
> Hi Paulo.
>
> > I've been thinking about user management and I have a couple of
> > questions.
> >
> > Is there a simple way to send an e-mail to everyone on the database,
> > or are
> > there plans to implement this, perhaps in the Web interface?
>
> Right now this isn't possible, however we can look at trying to do
> this in the future.
>
> > Would it be too much trouble to assign the user's default group
> > using an
> > additional LDAP attribute?
>
> As of now there are no plans to do this as it's fraught with a lot of
> issues, but we can certainly look at something along these lines going
> forward. What are you thinking specifically? Your best bet at the
> moment is to approach this either through the web interface or a
> script, the latter of course requires some programming with OMERO.
>
> > - Paulo
>
> Ciao.
>
> -Chris