Re: Self-service user creation (0.3.0 and beyond -- was Re: Release 0.4.0 planning)

On 20/07/11 08:54, Jan Provaznik wrote: Both accounts are correct. Self-service account creation on the login page was inadvertently removed during the overhaul of the login page, and I then confirmed to Jan that the patch could/should be ack'ed despite the apparent regression. All that serves to open up a conversation about what we actually want to design into the app. I'm not at all convinced that there's really a credible use case where an organisation which deploys Conductor will want to enable *anyone* who can navigate to the login page to start creating deployments, consuming resources, and spending money. In the corporate world, it is far more likely that organisations will require that users are correctly identified and associated with their cost centre/business unit etc. first, so that their usage can be correctly accounted for and charged back etc.. Away from corporate users, any organisation or group of users is going to want some level of control, since the person who is paying by the hour for running deployments is, almost by definition, not the self-service user who creates an account without reference to anyone else. Even with self service user account creation enabled, we don't necessarily achieve the goal of reducing administrative overhead, and letting users just use the app without administrative overhead, since administrators will still be required to ensure that the roles associated with a specific user, and the pools to which they have access etc. are correct. Another advantage of allowing users to create their own accounts is that it allows administrators to crowdsource what is otherwise a tedious, repetitive task. Even when user's credentials are contained in LDAP or AD, there's still per-user grouping, permissions etc. I wonder if we'd be better off providing admins with a CSV file format through which they could specify user parameters in a spreadsheet for bulk import. Angus