A group member data set maintains InterAction user groups by adding and removing group members. User groups are primarily used in InterAction to assign permissions and access rights. A group member data set is useful if you want to make the membership of your InterAction groups match groups from another system.
Application Collaboration cannot update group membership information for users managed by Active Directory that are in groups managed by Active Directory. If Application Collaboration attempts to update group membership for the managed user, an error is written to the SQL Results Error Log. However, if either the group or user is not managed by Active Directory, Application Collaboration can make the update.
When using a group member data set, you harvest the group name and a mapping value to identify an InterAction user. When transforming the data set, Application Collaboration does the following for each row harvested from the external system:
- Finds the InterAction user to add to the group. You can choose the method used to do this.
- Matches the harvested group name to an existing InterAction group.
- Adds the user to the specified group.
You can also configure the data set to also remove previously-added group members. In this case, Application Collaboration compares the harvested data with the existing groups and removes users that were not harvested.
The group member data set has the following restrictions:
- The data set can only update existing groups - it cannot create groups. However, the groups can be either active or inactive.
- The data set can only add existing InterAction users to the groups; it cannot create new users. However, the users can be either active or inactive.
- Each data source can have at most one group member data set.