GMS Membership Management

GMS is a Group Management System for both authorisation to CERN systems and mailing lists.

Who can be a member of a GMS Group?

Identities

Identities are a collection of information about a person along with their accounts.

For example: Identity jdoe is a Graduate on a two year contract. She has a CERN Account jdoe and a trusted Google account that she will use to authenticate after she leaves to access her tax certificate and the alumni platform. If jdoe is part of a group, she is part of it regardless of whether she authenticates with Google or with her CERN account.

Unconfirmed Identities are placeholders that reserve group membership until someone has logged in with an account that matches the email. This allows people to receive emails for GMS groups that are mailing lists even if they have never logged in to CERN.

Groups

Groups can be part of GMS groups. They can contain further groups or identities.

Mailing list recipient emails

By default, the email of the Identity's main account is the communication email for GMS groups used as mailing lists. It can be overwritten to become a different email owned by the Identity.

Removing non-active members

For professional GMS groups we highly recommend selecting "Purge non-active Users" in the GMS portal (removeNonActiveMembers in the API). This will mean that members are removed when they are no longer active at CERN.

For GMS groups with many external members (such as clubs and alumni) we do not recommend ticking this option as any members that are known CERN Identities will be removed when they leave CERN.