AEM as a Cloud Service: Create copy of existing user group?

[KateSumbler]

I am wondering if it is possible to create copies of an existing user group? I am looking at creating several dozen user groups that have the same set of permissions, but to different folders based on projects/clients. It would be nice to set up one group, then create a copy of it and just change the /content path to the folder rather than setting up all permissions from scratch each time.

I tried selecting the group and using the "Copy" function on the toolbar on the out of the box DAM Users group that has many ACL entries and 5 members, however the new group it created didn't have any members or ACL entries. Not sure what Copy does that is different from just creating a new group?

Any ideas on how I can make a copy of a user group in AEM as a Cloud?

[Jörg_Hoh]

For this case I would use the Netcentric AC Tool (https://github.com/Netcentric/accesscontroltool).

[KateSumbler]

Are there any options that don't involve installing additional tools? This will not be an acceptable solution for the implementation I am working with on this project. 

It seems odd that the "Copy" function is there, but doesn't actually copy the user group, but instead just creates an empty new group with no ACLs, etc.

[JulioFe]

Any answers for the copy function? It's not working for me either.

[Jörg_Hoh]

Copying an existing group with the same ACLs does not make sense to me.

I would opt for automating this approach, as often it does not stay with these few dozen groups, especially when you need to make changes. With automation it's much easier to be sure that you have processed all groups and applied all the requested changes to all groups. And you can version the configuration for this tool as well.

[vivekanand-mishra]

@JulioFe The Group copy function does not copy the ACL or members. The group copy just creates a blank user group. I don't know what is your exact use case. But, as per the use case mentioned in this thread, creating such large number of copies would be disastrous in long term because then you have to manage ACL for each group separately after they are created. From my point of view, all such new copy groups should have been created from a base group and made member to that base group. So that changing permission in the base group in future would affect to all copy groups in future. 

Irrespective of bad or good design what I mentioned above, the copy option should have copied the ACL entries too. Also I think its not appropriate to copy users because that's now a different group and ideally copying user does not seem a valid desired use case. I sense, the copy behaviour can be desired differently based on use case by different organisations.

We have an Idea board in this community, I think it would be good if you describe your use case and propose the desired functionality on the Idea board - https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-experience-manager-ideas/idb-p/adobe-experien...

Thank you.

[JulioFe]

Thank you for your reply vivekanand-mishra we are required to manage access to folders based on clients and by extension grant access to only those who work on a particular account. The folders are at the top level of AEM Assets and are named and organized by the clients we service. We have staff teams that are assigned to work on each of our clients, and staff should only have access to the client folders for which they are assigned to work on (Principle of least privilege). But beyond the file access there are important role based permissions on what users are allowed to do (Read/Write vs Read only, Deny delete, removal of workflows, Read only access to Asset Properties/Metadata, etc...)  I have created some groups base on those roles and now need to create groups for each of our clients (over 180 clients) for each role. Obviously not having the ability to copy groups would make this a monumental manual laborious task. Currently when I select a group and click copy I get a blank page with only a "Cancel" button and the "Save & Close" button is greyed out (does nothing) nothing else on the page. I created a support ticket but it is yet to be resolved. Hope this helps better explain the situation.