Large Group Support (Affiliations)

What is a Kuali Group?

A Group is a specific instance of an organization within the hierarchy. For example, Department (Category) could include Math (Group) as a specific instance of a department. Other Groups within the Category "Department" might include English, Biology, or Art History.

Groups are commonly used to serve a few purposes in Kuali: 1) in the Form Builder and when determining routing in Workflow, and 2) to give all users within a Kuali Group permission to access to various parts of the system (See the Creating and Managing Groups article).

Note: It is important to note that Kuali has a limit of 1,000 users that can be added to a Group. We typically recommend not adding more than 800 users to a Group to preserve a good user experience.

When considering this limitation, most Kuali administrators will use the Kuali Groups and Roles functionality when it comes to the Form Builder and when assigning approvers/reviewers in Workflow. It is a best practice for approvers/reviewers within the workflow process to consist of one individual or a small cohort of people rather than large groups of folks.

Assigning Permissions to Large Groups

At times you may find it necessary to give large groups of people (800+) access to forms and other areas of the system. For example, you may want to make a form available for all faculty on campus but not students. Rather than using the Kuali Group functionality to give these permissions, we recommend using the Affiliations permission option. 

Affiliations are typically configured during implementation of your SAML Single Sign-on, and consultation with a Kuali consultant is required. A Kuali consultant with work with your campus's identity management team to make your SAML Affiliations available to Kuali. Once available in Kuali, you can assign permissions throughout the system to users in your SAML Affiliations groups. Anyone assigned to a particular Affiliation on the SAML side can then have access to whatever you give that group in Kuali. Users can be assigned to multiple Affiliations.  More information on the SSO configuration required can be found in the Configuring your SSO article.