BrownGroups is a great tool for people who are managing group membership in multiple systems. It provides one user interface for creating and managing groups without any IT involvement. As part of the group creation processs, administrators can identify in which other systems the group will be used.
By default, Department Identity Administrators, have administrator privileges in Brown Groups. Department Identity Administrators are the people in a Department who are able to sign SponsoredID forms. From within Brown Groups, they can add other people as Groups Administrators for their department.
Brown Groups are accessed through the MyAccount user interface.
Out of the box, each department has several groups that are maintained in Brown's business systems. These groups include: 1. All department members; 2. All Staff in a department, 3. All Faculty in a department, 4. All Undergraduate concentrators and 5. All Graduate Students.
The source systems that update Brown Groups are as follows:
- Departmental faculty rosters are maintained in the Faculty Information System (FIS)
- Departmental staff rosters are maintained in Workday
- Students enrolled in Courses, Undergraduate Concentrations or Graduate School Programs are maintained in Banner.
For example, the individuals who appear in the Philosophy, Regular Faculty group are the individuals that the Faculty Information System considers regular faculty.
Data from source systems is used to automatically maintain the base membership of related groups; people are added or removed from the associated group when they join or leave the assocaited department or concentration.
Brown Groups allows authorized individuals (administrators) to add people to the base membership of a group. This allows the membership to be customized to match what the department expects, as opposed to what is known by the business system.
Brown Groups also allows authorized individuals to create new adhoc groups. They can add individuals or other groups as members.
It is important to note that individuals who are added to the base membership are not automatically updated if they leave the University or transfer to another department.
Once a person is added or removed from a group, the membership of that group is automatically updated for all of your collaborative applications, i.e. Google, Active Directory. BrownGroups also allows you to control the properties of a group -- eg is it public or private.