Enhancing Group Management in Keycloak: A Flexible Extension for Dynamic Membership Control
Overview: This presentation introduces an advanced group management extension for Keycloak, aimed at providing greater flexibility and control over group memberships. Our goal is to overcome the limitations of Keycloak's hierarchical groups and eventually integrate this extension into Keycloak's core features.
Problem: Keycloak's current group system lacks essential capabilities, including the assignment of specific roles within groups, support for defining membership start and end dates, and functionality for tracking membership status, such as active, pending, or suspended.
Solution: Our extension addresses these limitations with several key features. It enables distinct roles for members, allows admins to define when memberships activate and expire, and permits users to be manually updated or removed based on configuration. Membership status management includes full membership status, pre-configured future memberships, and temporary deactivation of membership.
Empowering Group Administrators: This extension empowers group administrators by allowing them to manage their own and child groups independently, handle enrollment requests or invitations, and either manually or on-demand remove users from groups (versus automatically, once their membership expires), ensuring cleaner group management.
Enhanced User Experience: To improve usability, new menus in user and admin consoles simplify group management. Automated email notifications inform users and admins about key events like invitations and membership changes.
Development and Future Integration: Currently implemented as a Keycloak extension (plugin), this functionality allows for easy integration without core modifications. Given its significant value, we believe it should be considered for integration into Keycloak's core features. We will also demonstrate the code structure and how the extension interfaces with Keycloak's architecture.