Obsolete Computing Groups

Computing Groups are currently being reviewed. The goals of this operation are mainly two:

Remove legacy groups which are no longer needed: many of the groups have very little members, or have not been used in a long time, and they are no longer required for their original purpose.
Provide a better description of the purpose of the group: many groups have a very similar description (for example, there are ~15 groups with description "IT"), which makes things confusing for users that need to understand to which group they should subscribe.

This page explains the procedure used to make a Computing Group obsolete, and eventually delete it.

How a group is declared as obsolete

The administrators of the Account Management service send a mail to the administrators of the group, asking if the group is still required, or if it could be merged with another.

If the group is still in use, the administrators should provide:

A meaningful description for the group (this should be provided in the E-Groups site, in the "description" and "comments" fields of the group).
If necessary, the name of an owner for the group (the group's owner must be a person, and has the same privileges of a group administrator).

In case no answer is received from the administrator within a certain delay, specified in the email, the group is marked as obsolete.

What does it mean that a group is obsolete

When a group is marked as obsolete:

It is no longer possible to add members to the group, in particular:
- The group subscription policy is set to closed.
- The administrators group is removed.
- The group is shown as obsolete in the resources site.
All current members of the group are added to another computing group.
Group members are asked to move to the new group at their convenience, within a certain delay.
Once the delay is expired, remaining group members are moved to the new group.
Finally, the group is deleted.

How to request that a group marked as obsolete is restored

If you are an administrator of a group marked as obsolete, and you think that the group is still required, you can at any time ask for it to be restored to a "regular" computing group by writing an email to computing-groups-review@cern.ch, specifying: