The Group Management System (GMS)

GMS is the Group Management System for CERN. GMS groups are used for both access control and mailing lists. It is a production system already in use by many applications such as Indico, CDS, Single Sign-On and more. Currently (June 2025), it is possible to manage groups through both GMS and the legacy system, Egroups. Egroups will be decommissioned during 2026.

GMS is available as a web portal, https://groups-portal.web.cern.ch, and an API.

GMS Project Goals

The GMS project is jointly funded by FAP-BC and IT to fully develop GMS features to allow the e-groups service to be retired. GMS will introduce the following improvements for CERN and its collaborators:

Faster synchronisation of group members to Single Sign On, Active Directory and systems relying on the Authorization Service API
More fine grained controls on group privacy and sharing with systems

The initial project only covers the development of existing e-group features. Additional features are out of scope.

Timeline (updated February 2025)

Key dates

E-groups becomes read only during September 2025
E-groups is decommissioned soon after the start of Long Shutdown 3

GMS Presentations

ITUM

IT Business Engagement

What do you need to do?

Who are you?	Action required?	By when?
Group Owner	None. Your groups will be migrated for you. You can choose to migrate your groups early.	End Sep 2025
WRITE Egroups SOAP client	Migrate to GMS REST API. Migrate all groups that you manage.	End Sep 2025
READ Egroups SOAP client	Migrate to GMS REST API. READONLY Oracle DB export available on demand.	End Sep 2026
CSV user	Strongly recommend to move to GMS native format. Backwards compatibility provided temporarily.

Support

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