Working with External Collaborators
Collaborator Account Introduction
UMIACS provides collaborator accounts to facilitate collaboration with non-UMIACS Faculty, Staff and Employees. These accounts can access resources such as GitLab, UMobjstore, Wikis, and other web-based applications. These accounts do not have storage and access to UMIACS workstations, however.
How do I create a Collaborator Account?
A UMIACS Account holder has to sponsor the Collaborator Account. This is done in our UMIACS Requests Application. This will send an email to the Collaborator to set their details (including a username and password). Once the Collaborator has created their account, an email will be sent to both the account sponsor and the Collaborator that the account is ready to use.
Services Offered
Collaborators can access GitLab, the Object Store, as well as other web applications.
GitLab
GitLab is a source code collaboration software based on Git source control management. It supports built-in project wikis, code review, and issue tracking for each project. All Collaborators automatically get GitLab access. Although Collaborators can modify any of the repos you add them to, they do not get an allocation to create projects of their own.
Object Store
UMobjstore is the web application component complementing UMobj, the command-line utility used to interact with the Object Store. UMobjstore gives users a convenient interface to our Ceph Object Stores which are distributed across different machines, so that machines can fail and the cluster keep functioning.
Wikis
Wikis are great for providing collaborative web spaces. In order to access a particular wiki, a Collaborator will first have to be added to the respective SecGroup.
Controlling Access to your Collaborators
Security Groups
SecGroup are authentication groups that give PIs the ability to manage which users should have access to different applications that they manage. They provide fine-grained access control to wikis, source code repositories, and certain web applications.
Viewing Security Groups
You can view which SecGroups you can grant access to through the directory app: https://intranet.umiacs.umd.edu/directory/secgroup/