Grouper Is Taking Over Minneapolis at TechEX26. Come Help.

Two things are true every fall: The leaves turn, and the Grouper community descends on one lucky city to talk access management for a week straight. 

This year we’re back in Minneapolis, Minn., for the 2026 Internet2 Technology Exchange (TechEX26). Bring a coat, bring an appetite (a Juicy Lucy is not optional), and maybe cue up a little Prince on the flight in.

The Grouper community collaborates all year on calls and in Slack, but nothing beats being in the same room. Below is your cheat sheet to everything Grouper at TechEX26, including tutorials, sessions, a birds of a feather gathering, and some controlled unconference chaos. 

Registration for TechEX26 is open. You can filter the TechEX26 program by the Identity & Access Management (IAM) track.

Grouper MCP – Yeah, you know me (AI)

Here is a quick quiz, and please answer honestly:

1. Do you ever not quite remember how a corner of Grouper actually works? (Be honest. I built parts of it and I still look things up.)
2. Does standing up a GSH template or a custom daemon feel like assembling furniture with the instructions in a language you don’t speak?
3. Would you like to cut your ticket response time from “sometime this sprint” to “before my coffee’s cold”?
4. Do you dream of your power users helping themselves instead of helping themselves to your calendar?
5. Do you wish the Slack question you just asked would simply answer itself?

If you nodded even once, congratulations, you need the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – and this is the tutorial where you get it on Monday, Oct. 26, 1 – 4:30 p.m.

By the time TechEX26 rolls around, Grouper will have had AI/MCP functionality for a solid eight months now. Once your institution is on Grouper v7 and cleared to use AI, your access management practice doesn’t just improve; it hits the gas.

If you read one sentence in this entire post, read this one: You need Claude Code Pro ($20) for the hands-on portion. Bring a laptop, hope there is no Claude outage, and bring your questions.

In 3.5 hands-on hours, we’ll cover:

• Configuring Grouper to use MCP
• Actually connecting to it
• Access levels (who gets to do what)
• Scopes (putting MCP on a leash)
• Recipes for repeat tasks (a similar ticket next week has a plan)
• Institutional documentation (teaching the AI your rules)
• Real use cases from real deployments

Come build, or come watch and heckle. Either way you’ll leave being down with “MCP: yeah, you know me.”

Program Sessions

Thank you and kudos to the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan for developing these TechEX26 program sessions:

Whose Group Is It, Anyway? UVA’s Grouper Ownership and Provisioning Journey

Tuesday, Oct. 27, 9 – 9:50 a.m.

Presented by Shira Acosta and Chris Zysk, University of Virginia

The title says it all. This is the session where the points don’t matter, and the group ownership finally does. Rumor has it the audience shouts out a provisioning model, someone yells “in the style of policy groups!” and Shira and Chris improvise the whole talk on the spot.

UVA is doing the grown-up work a lot of us keep meaning to do — ditching privilege-based ownership for explicit owner groups and moving from folder-based to group-based provisioning. The UVA team will cover why they’re doing it, why they wish they’d done it on Day One, and what they’ve learned in the trenches so far. Come for the Whose Line is it Anyway? pun. Stay for the provisioning wisdom you’ll want to copy at your own shop.

Modernizing IAM with Okta and Grouper at University of Michigan

Wednesday, Oct. 28, 10:20 – 11:10 a.m.

Presented by Bruce Timberlake, Gail Lift, and Liam Hoekenga, University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is rebuilding IAM mid-flight. Okta, Grouper, and an AWS-hosted identity vault share one hybrid architecture, while the legacy systems keep healing themselves in the background. In their own words: “We have stories.”

This hour is loaded, featuring lessons from phase 1 of their campus multi-factor authentication (MFA) cutover from Duo to Okta, a pluggable authentication module (PAM) they built to wrestle an secure shell (SSH)/remote desktop protocol (RDP) problem to the ground, the very real drama of end-to-end propagation delays, and Grouper flexing into Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) affiliation calculations and license/entitlement control. Hear about real architecture tradeoffs from a big, gloriously decentralized university.

Grouper Birds of a Feather

Tuesday, Oct. 27, or Wednesday, Oct. 28, at Lunch

Grab a tray, find our room, and let’s talk shop with our mouths full.

Birds of a feather flock together, and Grouper birds flock at lunch. 

Here’s the format: You watch me eat for 10 minutes, and then I flip to the slides and talk like an auctioneer trying to cram a full year of developer work into a one-hour lunch. The team has been busy, the release notes are long, and I will be speaking at approximately 200 words per minute to fit it all in. 

After the fire hose of information, we get to the best part — your wish list. The best features on our roadmap started as somebody’s half-formed complaint over a conference lunch. Yours could be next. 

Advance CAMP

All Day Thursday, Oct. 29 and Friday, Oct. 30

Advance CAMP is a full-on unconference. There is no pre-baked agenda because you are the agenda. 

Participants show up with their real challenges, opportunities, and back-of-the-napkin ideas, pitch them to the room, and a handful of concurrent breakout sessions run every hour. Community scribes capture the good stuff, so it doesn’t evaporate by the time you’re back at your desk.

Here’s your game plan. Think now about what you want to hash out. Show up to the agenda-setting session early — Post-it notes in one hand, running shoes on your feet — and sprint to the boards the second they open, so Grouper gets its fair share of the slots. 

This is genuinely the best room at the conference for hearing how other institutions solve the exact problem currently ruining your Tuesdays, and for shaping the next round of the Grouper roadmap with the best and brightest IAM architects in research and higher education. 

Bring your own topics. Leave with answers, allies, and a roadmap you helped craft.

Get full details about everything I’ve highlighted here in the TechEX26 program.

See You Soon!

Whether it’s through one of our training programs or at TechEX26, we hope you will stay connected. On behalf of the Grouper team, we hope to collaborate with you soon.

About Grouper

Grouper is an enterprise access management platform that simplifies authorization by automating and delegating administration of groups and roles in your organization. Grouper is part of the InCommon Trusted Access Platform, an IAM suite of software designed to integrate with existing systems. Our roadmap is based on community input. Grouper, the access management component of the InCommon Trusted Access Platform, evolves to meet the community’s needs.

ICYMI

• Welcome to 2026 and Thank You to 2025
• The “Intersection” of Grouper and AI: Opportunities and Next Steps

Learn More and Register