flickr

Photo sharing site interesting because the communities form around the content, which provides a conceptual parallel to some of the "content is king" thinking behind Sakai 3.

Oliver

facebook

Use cases and screen shots

Daphne

linked in

a social network geared towards representing yourself and connecting professionally.

Keli

delicious

"a social bookmarking service" - a way to organize, keep track of, and share information assuming that information can be expressed as a link. "Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet"

Former user (Deleted)

Apple Mail.app / Address Book.app

Former user (Deleted)

Thunderbird

doodle

drupal

Open source content management system; believe it has very flexible identity and groups management

Barbra

google groups

Use cases and screen shots

Kristol

google docs

Use cases and screen shots

Kristol

Ning

Create a social network around a specific topic; thousands of social networks with specific purposes have been created here. Ning does a good job of keeping these networks separate.

screenshots

Keli

Moodle 1.9

Industry-standard, open-source Learning Management System.

Moodle groups screenshots

Former user (Deleted)

Blogger

Gives users a way to manage who can assist in editing content and who can view content as well as a
way to stay up-to-date on blogs that they follow

Daphne

Atlassian Crowd

A commercial product to manage integrated authentication, personal information, and group memberships across multiple applications including other Atlassian products, Subversion, Google Apps, OpenID-enabled sites, any Spring-Security-based application, and pretty much anything else.

Former user (Deleted)

Grouper

It's an Internet2 project that aims to provide general-purpose middleware for centralized group management. It includes a service library, a web application for administration, a shell client suitable for mass import/export, a web services interface, a DB implementation, an LDAP connector, and a DB source adapter. Although it hasn't gotten much use to date, the code continues to improve and developers at uPortal and Kuali Rice have said they intend to look at it again.

Former user (Deleted)

Catalyst

(U. Washington's collaborative web suite)

Interview notes and screenshots

Former user (Deleted)

Sakai 2

Sakai 3

Screenshots

Daphne

Liferay

Antioch U uses this portal and Daniel Tyger believes it to be a better fit for groups.

Notes based on interview and documentation

Former user (Deleted)

Former user (Deleted)

flickr

Flickr is largely about sharing photos that have been uploaded  to a personal repository, the Photostream. Only the account holder can contribute content to the Photostream, although others may be granted direct view access to the entire repository. The photos are usually categorized into Sets of 1 or more photos. Those with Pro accounts can further organize the sets into Collections consisting of 1 or more sets, and which may be nested up to 5 deep. Collections are available only to Pro account holders and are not reviewed.


Photos can be tagged individually or in batch, which enables sharing with a broader, collectively defined community of interest. Users known to an account holder, including those who are not Flickr members, may also be invited to view and comment on individual photos, sets, collections or the Photostream. Known users are actively managed as Contacts and Groups. Contacts must be Flickr members and may be categorized optionally as Friends and/or Family, which allows finer grained access controls to the content. Groups per se seem to exist to provide 3 things: a mechanism for providing more explicitly defined communities of interest, both public and private, a space where photos from multiple user repositories can be organized and shared with a community, and the optional use of a discussion board dedicated to the groups' shared photos.

facebook

fun, network, marketing

From the networking side, it's about sharing information.  It's an opt in situation so you can join groups you're interested in to stay on top of what's happening.  Some of my network groups are American Humane Association and Whole Dog Journal for instance.*  This is mostly a push but some organizations allow you to write anything on their walls.  Others, allow you to respond to certain posts.


With "friends" it's about connecting (and reconnecting), staying in touch, sharing what your interested in (via links, games, notes), what's going on in your life (via status, photos), sharing causes and organizations with others.  You can leave messages on their walls and visa versa.

You can create a page for your organization and use it to market by alerting connections of happenings. 

*Note from Keli: there are 3 distinct types of activities in FB: becoming a friend, becoming a fan of an organization's page, and becoming part of a group. Groups don't seem to be discussed so I'm adding it here (AHA has a page with fans, not a "group.")

When you sign up for a personal account, people can become your friend. When you sign up as a public entity (business, political or music group, etc), people become fans of your Page. Anyone can become a fan of a page, but friends have to be approved. However, a friend and a Page look approximately the same.
An actual group, in the FB sense of the word, however looks different from either of these. They are created using the groups application. I'm sure you can remove a fan, but groups can be set up to require approval or invite or be open. They are under the control of owners and officers. They have Walls to post on and discussion boards, like a fan page, but I've never seen activity from a group appear in my news feed. Groups don't have ads like fan pages, so they are less well known. For more info, see http://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-group-vs-facebook-fan-page-whats-better/7761/

linked in

professional

didn't start with groups--it was about connections. However, you can create groups, usually for alumni or companies that are either joinable or you must request to join

delicious

watching what your contacts are tagging
sharing tags with others

There are not really any formal groups in Delicious. When you follow another Delicious user (to borrow a term from Twitter) they become part of your Network. Delicious also says that you are a fan of theirs, and if they follow you, they are your fan but this terminology is inconsistently used. You can also organize different sub-groups of your network into bundles so that you can easily see all the bookmarks tagged by your "friends" or the people on the groups project.

A network or network bundle is just a convenient way for you for you to see the tagging activity of the people who you follow. And while other people can see your network and your network bundles, they can't change your network; your network belongs only to you.
But Delicious also provides for another kind of sharing which feels a lot like a group, or at least it allows a group, one defined outside of Delicious, to share information. You can agree with other Delicious users to share a common tag. For example everyone on the Sakai 3 Groups project could use the tag @sakai3_groups when tagging bookmarks that pertain to the project. And then those folks (and anyone else) can subscribe or follow that tag. But the tag doesn't belong to anyone--anyone can follow it, anyone can tag to it. It's just a social agreement.

mail

doodle

google groups

To discuss special interests

Groups are created around a special interest (e.g., computers, society, recreation, news).  A group can: start a discussion topic and post topics and replies, create web pages and discuss them, and upload files.

google docs

Share files for other users to view and/or collaborate on 

Groups are used to determine who has access to view and/or edit a file.  Depending on the settings, the group can view the file, edit the file, invite others to view to edit or view the file, and/or send invitations to view or edit a file to mailing lists that work for all mailing list recipients.

Ning

professional personal special interest

Ning lets you create unique social networks on it's site that are completely separate from each other. This way, your family site can be separate from your hobby site and your professional interest site and you can have separate content on each, including custom profiles. It also has discussions, blogs, and chat so you can actually discuss ideas beyond a status update with comments.

Moodle1.9

online learning component of academic courses

Moodle 1.9 has no system-wide groups. Groups are tied to a course or activity. Roles, on the other hand, are system-wide. Roles define permissions and "what one can do" in the system - hence "Instructor" and "Student" are roles. Groups in Moodle are essentially ad hoc and under local control of site administrators (though they can be created and managed centrally as well). An email list for a class would be a group; TAs for class X would be a group whose members share in the permissioning scheme of the TA role. But sometimes the desired construct is a hybrid of the Role/Group model - one use case is a "Department Administrator" role with group access to only a subset of class sites in the system (all Biology, for example). Students can belong to more than one group in a course. Settings allow for enabling/disabling visibility of groups. Groupings also allow the assigning of activities/resources to certain groups -- all at the course level.

Moodle groups screenshots

Blogger

Atlassian Crowd

AFAIK most Crowd users are customers of other Atlassian products, and their goal is integration.

At the top of the users and groups hierarchy are Directories. Crowd maintains an internal database-stored Directory. A web interface can connect other Directories to a wide range of LDAP sources. Directories can be merged. Users can be assigned application-specific aliases and can be given custom attributes. Directories and groups are assigned access rights to integrated applications. The applications can also refer to imported groups for their own purposes.

Grouper

Any group that may be used in multiple contexts.

The product attempts to abstract "group" from other concepts, and so there's not a lot of extra meaning attached. Groups can have attributes (notably a type, with associated attributes or membership lists), can be collected into folder hierarchies, can be given privileges within Grouper, can be merged or otherwise manipulated, can be browsed and searched, and most importantly can be integrated into other products via a Java interface, web services, or an LDAP connector.

Catalyst

Your own workspaces and web tool instances

Groups are chiefly used to define access and roles in shared workspaces and web tools. Currently the Group Manager is chiefly used to get access to class enrollment lists. It can also be used to set up groups for use in the owner's own workspaces. The next version of Catalyst is expected to support shared (globally accessible) group management, and integration with other sorts of LDAP-defined groups.

Sakai 2

Sakai 3

Currently only grouping is the implicit site membership group.  

Currently site membership only.  Gives people access to the site and creates a search filter.

flickr

facebook

You become "friends" (or a fan) with a person, cause or organization which essentially means you become part of their group. 


You can subgroup your "friends" to control access of your status update, photos, general information you share.

You can also tag notes with people's names so they get invited to read the note and participate in the activity. 

And, you can create a page for your company or organization and invite others to part of the network.

You can initiate becoming friends with someone.  They have to accept your friendship (and visa versa).  Friends may suggest other friends (or causes, organizations) to you.  Both parties have to accept the suggestion.

Organizations advertise on their own website and other places to become friends of a fan of theirs.   You can also find them


If someone adds you to a note, you become part of an short term implicit group but may not ever do anything with it.  Typically, someone is asking you to read something they wrote or to participate in a "chain" (ex. what are you're favorite things and once you've done it, tag people you want to read your response, and on and on).

linked in

Go to Groups and Create a Group. Name it and set it up

You can have it be joinable (automatically approved) or require others to be approved when they request to join. It's not clear that you can invite people to a group you belong to--you can "share" the group, which is pretty much just sending them a message with a link. If group were open, they could view it and opt to join it, but if not, they would need to be approved.  You can't add people without their consent.

delicious

While your network is created for you, you assign members of your network to network bundles which act like sub-groups.

Your network is yours to do what you will with. While other will see when you've added then to your network, they can't choose to let you follow them or not.

It is also true that if you follow someone else, it will show in their network that you are a fan. However, if you had your network from others, your following activity is also hidden. 

mail

doodle

google groups

From Google Groups Home, you click the 'Create Groups...' button.

You can add people to your group when you create the group.  You can also allow people to join your group or you can have a private, non-joinable, group.

google docs

From Docs Home or from file, users clicks 'Share' and then enters a user's email address or they can choose a user from their contacts list. Users cannot currently share folders, only files.

Users are added to groups by invite only.  Only owners or editors, if given permission, may initiate an invitation to a group.  Only owners or editors with permission control the add.  Once you are added to a group, the file appears in your list of files on your Docs Home under All Items.  You may remove the file, however, it doesn't appear that there is anyway to get the file back once it has been removed.  It appears that the owner needs to re-invite you to view/edit the file.

Ning

Once you have established a ning account, just name your social network, give it a URL on Ning. You have to create a space (site) as part of this set up process. You don't have to invite people immediately.

If your network is private, you must be invited. If it is public,  members can invite people to a network and outsiders can join (don't know if they have to be approved, but they can be blocked). You cannot add someone to your group without their acceptance--they must be invited.

Moodle1.9

Groups can be auto created from an existing set of users in the same role, or they can be defined and populated manually by a course administrator. See Moodle groups screenshots.

Students (users with a Role of "Student") can auto-enroll in online course sites if the system is configured for this. They then would join the group "Students of Class X." Users who are assigned to specific Roles have a set of attributes and permissions which are defined at the system level. One of those powers can be to administer other Roles below them in the hierarchy. This can include managing, creating and administering groups within course sites as well -- the Instructor role can do this. However, there is a definite cascade of permissions within the system.

Moodle groups screenshots

Blogger

Atlassian Crowd

Groups and sub-groups (or nested groups) can be imported or manually created.

Members are imported or added manually.

Grouper

A user with privileges needs to "Act as admin" and then pick a folder or group under which to add the new group.

You can assign joining privileges to other folders or groups, but the process is awkward. You add groups or individuals directly by assigning the "member" privilege in the same way.

Catalyst

You either select an entry from the list of classes which you officially teach or you create a personal group and add members by ID.

Groups per se are either manually managed, or fed from an external source with manual additions. Implied groups who show up in access administration are "the public", "all authenticated users", and "anyone with an official university ID".

Sakai 2

Sakai 3

Adding members to a site is only option at this point.

See screenshots for site membership

flickr

facebook

The "owner" of the group has administrative permissions and by default everyone else is on the same level.  As an owner of your friends, you can block certain individuals from seeing your posts and/or from their posts showing up on your wall.  I don't believe you can block "friends" from writing on your wall though. (note from Keli, yes, you can block friends or groups of friends).
For groups there is an owner, admin & members.  

Doesn't seem to be available.  However, you can give others admin rights which seems to be the same as an owner.  Interestingly, in the interface, the owner doesn't have a role displayed although those with admin show they are admins.

linked in

There are Owners, Managers, and Members. Owners are the only one who can delete a group, but other than that, Managers have most rights to the group (settings, approving members)

There can be multiple managers, but only one owner (I think). Ownership can be transferred to other managers (old owner becomes a manager)

delicious

no roles

no roles

mail

doodle

google groups

There are owners, managers and members.  Once the owner selects a member to be a manager, both the owner and the manager can approve posts, invite new members, create managers, and change the group's management settings. Only the owner, however, can create a co-owner, transfer ownership to another user, or remove the group.  The available permissions are shown in the provided screenshot.

Yes, you can transfer and/or share ownership.

google docs

There are owners and editors.  Editors may have different permissions than owners depending on the permissions the owner has granted the editor.  The permissions that may be granted to the editor role are: view, edit, and the permission to allow editors to invite others to edit or view (this permissions grants editors access to see who else has access).

Ownership can be transferred for documents and pdfs only.  This feature has not yet been implemented for spreadsheets. 

Ning

Creator of social network has administrative role, by default everyone else is a member. You can add and name new roles.

Others can get admin rights, but I don't know if original owner can be demoted to a member or blocked.

Moodle1.9

This is very configurable. Roles can cascade down and be overridden under some circumstances while groups can include members with different roles. See Moodle groups screenshots

With the right permissions, yes.

Blogger

Atlassian Crowd

Users can be given Roles within a directory, but these are currently treated the same as Groups (except for not supporting subgroups). Atlassian is trying to work out the requirements which distinguish roles. Being middleware, the only permissions Crowd deals with involve Crowd functionality; one interesting twist is that integrated applications are also given Crowd permissions (e.g., the ability to create and manage Crowd groups). Of course, the integrated applications can use imported users and groups any way they choose, including assigning application-internal roles and permissions.

Administrative rights can be shared.

Grouper

Grouper-specific privileges are granted to entities. GroupSysAdmin and EveryEntity are built-in entities specifically used for setting up privileges. Privileges include Optin ("may join this group or folder of groups"), Optout ("may leave this group or folder"), View ("may see that the group or folder exists"), Read ("may see the group's or folder's membership list"), Update ("may change membership"), and (confusingly) Member ("is a member").
Although roles are not explicitly supported, they can be implemented by having multiple lists attached to a group. The default list is just "members" but others can be created.

Ownership isn't really a supported concept.

Catalyst

Currently groups are assigned tool-defined roles on a tool-by-tool basis. The CommonView content collaboration tool supports Participants, Collaborators, and Administrators, and the Catalyst team is currently working on reducing roles across the suite to that basic trio. Other roles in use include "Assistant", "Moderator", "Reviewer", "Editor", and "Grader".

The term delegation isn't used AFAIK, but when the Administrator role is available that can give owner-level rights.

Sakai 2

Sakai 3

There are some permission settings required at setup.  See screenshots for permissions.  Would be great if we make some assumptions and set defaults so this setting doesn't always have to happen.

Not yet.

flickr

facebook

Search exists but seems to only be title matches; no tagging or descriptors for instance.
Facebook also makes suggestions to you about groups.

You are always logged into facebook.  You can't see someone's (or an organization's) 'wall' unless you are part of their friends (or fan) group. 

When you search for groups, you just see title and catergory?

linked in

Search by keyword, narrow down by category (alumni, company, interest group) and language. Groups are also suggested to you.

Can't see or search any groups if not logged in. Name, description, logo, group type, owner, members that are already in your network, # of members, date created to non members. Members can see all members,  updates, subgorpus,

delicious

word of mouth: pass along an RSS feed or agree on a common tag (See above)

mail

doodle

google groups

Yes, you can make your group public so other users can find your group.  However, I cannot figure out how to find my group that I made public!  This is probably a negative of this application.

I can find other groups, however, by drilling down through categories or by doing a search.

Activity, Description, Language, Categories, Access, Feeds (Latest 15 messages or All available feeds), Archive calendar, top poster and related groups.  See provided screenshot.

google docs

Each group is tied to a document, so when you find the document, in essence, you find the group.  To find a document, you need to log in to Google Docs and then look under All Items.  The document that has been shared with you will appear there.

There are permissions the owner can set that allow users to view and/or edit a document without logging in, but the default permission requires users to log in to view and/or edit a document.  If you have are logged in and you have permission to edit, you can see the other members of the group.  If you have permission to view or if you have permission to edit without logging in, you cannot see the other members of the group.  The only information you can see about the other group members is their display name and their permissions.

Ning

Private groups can't be found, but otherwise you can search by keywords, or browse by trendy topics. Groups can also be suggested to you (scary--I think it saw my gmail address and got insight into my activities there)

Name, description, tags, Creator, number of members to non-members.

Moodle 1.9

Because groups are contextualized within course sites, they are not discoverable in and of themselves. Groups are not independent entities in the system. Within courses, groups can be set to be mutually visible or invisible so that sections, for example, can't see each other.

Depending on system configuration and user role, you can see: Group Name, Member list (by name), User count on the admin side. Within the interface, groups usually appear by name (in lists, form dropdowns, etc). Membership in a group can also be time-delimited and assigned randomly - which could be useful for quizzes, polls, surveys and the like.

Blogger

Atlassian Crowd

Directories can be browsed and searched. You can also see a given user's group and role memberships.

A group only has a name, a description, and an "Active" checkbox. Non-administrators can be given the right to view their own user profile, including group and role memberships.

Grouper

You can browse or search by path substring or attributes.

What you can access depends on your privileges in the group. If you can see the group at all, you can see all its attributes. If you're allowed, you can also see its membership (confusingly, by selecting "Manage members").

Catalyst

Currently you can only see a list of groups you've created and a list of classes that you officially teach.

The class list is a simple tree of Term -> Class -> Section: "Spring 2009" -> "HIST 202" -> "HIST 202 A". You can view the enrollment list for each class or section, but I haven't seen what that looks like.

Sakai 2

Sakai 3

You can find a site.

Just the members and it isn't even considered an official group.

flickr

facebook

If you think of your group of friends as a group, then you can create subgroups of them.  They are called 'lists'.  It seems like the only thing you can do with them is see them as a list and exclude them from access to various bits of information (see screenshot to right - "core friends and family" is one of my lists). There doesn't seem to be a way to interact with just this group.
 
Keli's note: there are additional types of groups that others can join, as opposed to groups of friends--do these have subgroups?

No

linked in

Yes, managers can create a subgroup within a group, for the purpose of targetting Discussions, News, Jobs and Digest Emails.

no automated way, but the FAQ recommends making one group the main group, copying the invite URL for this main group and sending it to the group to be dissolved.

delicious

Creating sub-groups, called bundles in Delicious: See above under Creating a Group.
Merging is not supported.

mail

doodle

google groups

No

No

google docs

No 

Not really.  You can select multiple documents and invite users to view/edit, but once the users have been invited, there's really no way to merge those users with users that are viewing/editing another document.

Ning

Yes. Top level groups are called "social networks" and have unique domain name. Subgroups are "groups" within the network. They can be open or joinable (by invite only, by request, or both)

Probably not--they have unique address. Not sure if you could take memberships of groups you own and merge them.

Moodle1.9

Depends on mode. The group mode can be one of three levels:
No groups - there are no sub groups, everyone is part of one big community
Separate groups - each group can only see their own group, others are invisible
Visible groups - each group works in their own group, but can also see other groups
The group mode can be defined at two levels:
1. Course level
The group mode defined at the course level is the default mode for all activities defined within that course.
2. Activity level
Each activity that supports groups can also define its own grouping mode. If the course is set to "force group mode" then the setting for each activity is ignored.
So a "grouping" is essentially a group of groups. Locally-assigned roles are also possible to add flexibility.

 They can be edited, but there is no express "merge" option. Members can be added across groups and empty  groups can be deleted.

Blogger

Atlassian Crowd

Yes.

No, although Directories can be. 

Grouper

Yes. You create a subgroup by creating a group while looking at a group.

Yes, by using the mathematical set operations of union, intersection, and complement. You have to jump through some hoops to select the component groups.

Catalyst

No.

No.

Sakai 2

No.

No.

Sakai 3

flickr

facebook

Use of pictures almost always when looking at lists of people.

Access control by groups is done an exception basis which seems like a backward model to me.  So all your friends have access to your profile by default.  You can then say "except" a person or list of persons.  I think the normal model is to say I want this group to have access.

When inviting people to become a fan a page (i.e. group) there is not an opportunity to send a personal message.  We will want to include a way to add a personal introduction message to any invitations.

Inconsistent interface and interactions for selecting groups of people.

linked in

Not really. Though it does well for maintaining professional profile and connections, you can't do much with groups, just start discussions (unless they've been disabled) or message other members directly. Even managers can't mass email the group--they can only post a discussion.

This may be opinion, but LinkedIn seems like it started as a way to make sure you didn't lose track of professional contacts and to get introduced to other people, not as an everyday destination. Groups don't seem to form as a way to get work done or even to keep in touch with friends and can grow into the thousands. It seems more like A) a badge that appears on your profile (I was a part of this prestigious organization) B) an easier way to contact people who may not be personal contacts but who are a member of a certain group. This is just the context of LinkedIn and I don't think it is that relevant.

delicious

When creating network bundles (sub-groups), Delicious gives you the ability to see what users you have already assigned to another group. This is a very simple way to see who has not yet been assigned to a group or to avoid adding someone to more than one group.

mail

doodle

google groups

The ability to search and join a group that is of interest to you seems to be really powerful.  It's fairly obvious once you've found the group what you can do as a member of the group (i.e., add pages, upload files, and post to discussion).  It's also fairly obvious what is new since you last visited the group.  That would be a really nice feature for students.

It's really difficult, actually so far it's impossible, for me to find my group in the public directory.  I don't think it's because I am looking in the wrong place, I think it's because it's just not there and I'm not really sure why it's not there, so I guess we would want to make sure people know exactly how to find their group in the event that they want people other than the people they invite to join their group.

google docs

It is extremely obvious which users have access to a document and of those users, which user is the owner of the group.  The simplicity of the groups creation process and the limited number of permissions provided to each group member is refreshing.  While it is a bit limiting, you can still get done what you need to get done for the most part and you don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do what you want to do.

Sometimes it appears that you are able to set permissions when you are not.  For example, when I select a folder and then click the Share drop-down menu, the option to invite users is there, but it is greyed out.  At first, I thought that maybe I hadn't selected the right combination of things to enable the share permission for a folder, but after a bit of searching, I determined that it isn't currently possible to share folders.  If an option isn't available, don't show it to the user.  It's misleading.  I think greying out is fine if it is a viable option and certain things need to be done before you can un-grey (is that a word?) it out, but if you haven't implemented the functionality, why show it to the user?

Give the other group members a little more information about the users in the group so that if they want to invite that same user to another group, they have the information you require from them to send the invitation.  

Ning

In FB, you can get in trouble posting something for one group of friends that another group shouldn't see. Here, you create a separate network and context is obvious--each network has its own skin. You can have separate content (profiles,updates, etc) for specific contexts. Better suited for constructive work than FB, which seems more for short bursts of communication and photos. 

Of the cuff, no negatives. Some may not like that you can't share content between social networks (You do have a unified profile where you can post links, separate from your network specific profiles, but that's it). If you make a blog post in one network (say Sakai), it has to be copied and pasted into another if you're part of a related but separate network (say, Open Source Designers). If I had to choose between privacy/simplicity and the chance to share, I'd choose first option, but it could be interesting if you could tag content to be viewable by multiple networks. You may or may not want to mix the comments from both groups--while it might be a chance to learn, openness could also squelch discussion. We would need to think about this in the context of academic networking.

Moodle 1.9

The Roles vs. Groups model is worth emulating. It allows for very targeted permissions at the admin level and for flexible ad hoc groups under user control.

The fact that groups are contextualized within course sites makes them less flexible than they ought to be. It traps users within a very one-off workflow model and prevents their ability to perform batch actions across multiple sites.

Blogger

Atlassian Crowd

Easily configurable LDAP integration seems very worthwhile. Although functionality is limited, the screenshots seem intuitively clear.

Grouper

The Grouper web application appears to provide a lot of functionality but is unintuitive. I hit unexpected displays or dead ends when trying to follow links. Nor is it always clear what the results of privileges will be. (For example, after I give a normal user every permission within a group, they still can't seem to create subgroups there.) Pure membership is mixed with privilege management in a confusing fashion. Back button support seems problematic. Newcastle University (the newest publicly-announced Grouper user) helped work on the web service interface to implement a more usable UI - I should probably take a look at that when we get to services.

Catalyst

Except perhaps for the proliferation of roles, the UX is very clear with little room for unpleasant surprises.

Sakai 2

Sakai 3

Liferay

Web-based support for integrating with LDAP authentication, personal information, and group memberships.