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

[Chris Allan]

On 4 Jun 2008, at 16:20, Paulo Almeida wrote:

> Hi Chris,

Hi Paulo.

>
>
> 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.

Understood. Also, whenever a user is populated in an OMERO  
installation from LDAP e-mail information is also copied over. We'll  
look at adding a "Notify All Users Via E-mail" feature in Beta-4.0.

>
>
> 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).

Yes, the vast differences in LDAP implementations and schema decisions  
are fundamentally the reason why OMERO's LDAP plugin does not not  
provide such functionality. WebAdmin should provide you with most of  
the tools you need to manage group membership (we hope). Do let us  
know if there's anything you feel is missing that we can help with.

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

Ciao.

-Chris