[Ryan75]

I'm looking for guidance on how to go about organizing an extremely large list of active directory groups to be condense down for a basic menu system by group

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The menu system is part of a website that allows multiple schools in our company to access basic website needs (student grading, reports, student/admin services, etc). This website is PHP and SQL related.

I haven't worked in the large application of group control before this project and only had to work with a handful of groups titles.. This list given to me that I need to reorganize has about 2218 groups in the active directory! for each to be given an individual menu would be... well you know.

I can separate the groups by schools right now which goes to 26 campuses.. that helps some, but the subcategory of titles are still somewhat unique and a tiny fraction of them (haven't read every 2218 yet) have a misspelling or space difference in the group name (ex. Tech1 Help Desk compared to Tech1 HelpDesk) .. and I'm stuck at what to do from here.

[1.] I was thinking to mainly create some sub groups and put similar AD groups in that subgroup... such as Help Desk <= any variations of a Help Desk. Thus meaning i will have to manually select each one and place in a group.

[2.] ?? yeah.. 1 is all i can think of.

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tiny sample of the ad groups...

ELCInstructors
ELCStudents
ET Program Manager
Extern Coordinators
Financial Aid
Financial Aid Advisor Lead
Financial Aid Assistant Director
Financial Aid Director
GDA Program Manager
GE Program Manager
GE Instructors
Graduate Placement
Graduate Placement Manager
HUC Extern Coordinators

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** the end result is probably more SQL tables than PHP, but what have some of you done or tips can you give in organizing a large active directory group list to control a menu?


Thanks
Ryan

[Ryan75]

Anybody reading this has any suggestions?

[Ryan75]

O.K.

I'm guessing people aren't interested in this?
Waited a year... sigh.

[wirehopper]

I would start by looking at the AD data management to clean it up. You need reliable data for it to work.

The next step I would take is to get a whiteboard and try to layout a relational database to support it. Perhaps tables for schools, campuses, and groups. Each of these tables would have a unique id for each record, as well as a parent id. This would allow a hierarchy of one to many relationships.

Another approach would be to just use the AD data. Have a script that builds the menus every night, extracting the data from AD. That way, you don't have to maintain the data in multiple places.