Plans for multiple shared repositories in KAF?

ckong11

Are there any plans to allow for multiple shared repositories in KAF like there is for Mediaspace? It would really help a group of instructional designers share media across sites they are building out in the LMS (specifically Canvas and Moodle).

I found this: https://knowledge.kaltura.com/help/how-to-create-multiple-shared-repositories-in-kaf

And I am hoping to replicate this for KAF: https://knowledge.kaltura.com/help/shared-repository

thomas_ellis

@ckong11 , so if I understand you correctly, then I think you're actually fine. The limitation of not having more than one shared repo only applies to a single LMS (or more appropriately, one KAF instance). In that scenario, you can't have more than one shared repo in one LMS, but if you have multiple LMS's (or multiple KAF instances), then each can have it's own unique shared repo. Does that make sense, and is that helpful to your use case?

mkraft

@ckong11 It sounds like you are confusing channel membership with media ownership/collaboration. They are two different things. Membership (manager, contributor, moderator, member) determines an individual's or group's role in individual channels. For example, I can be a manager in Channel A and a member in Channel B. This doesn't have anything to do with my ability to upload, publish or edit media. It just sets my capabilities to work within the channel (managers can manage users, change channel settings, add content and members can only view content, for example).

A user's role in a Mediaspace can only ever be one thing (unmoderatedAdminRole, adminRole, privateOnly, viewerRole, anonymous). With the exception of anonymous, which is the unauthenticated users, the role is assigned at login.

In order to manage media, a user has to be have a role of least privateOnly. ViewerRole and anonymous don't get a My Media, so those roles should never be made co-editor/publisher or owners of media.

We use Kaltura groups in KMS when we need to allow more than one person to act as an owner or contributor. For example, I might have a group for Math Dept Media Owners. After the media is uploaded by an individual they may have been trained to change the owner to Math Dept Media Owners so their colleagues can also act as owners for that one entry. This is how you get around the "only one owner" rule. Kaltura recognizes the user is a member of the Kaltura group when they log in to KMS, and this gives them the appropriate access. Remember that group members must have at least a privateOnly role in the KMS so that they have a My Media.

One headache when you manage people vs groups is that the user you want to set as an owner or collaborator may not be in your KMS user database if they've never logged in to that KMS before. Logging in to KMS is what adds the user to the KMS user database. If the user doesn't exist in the database, your options are to instruct them to log in once so they are added, or a KMC admin can manually add them in the Manage Users area of the KMS admin, then the owner can add them in the front end as anew owner or collaborator.

We frequently use the samlGroupSync module in KMS to create and manage Kaltura groups for KMS. This works really well for us because our authentication system at Michigan offers a self-service group management tool that our users are quite familiar with. So, the individual people are added/removed in the self-service tool and the Kaltura groups are updated via the module configuration when they log in to KMS. This is a powerful feature gets around the missing user issue in the KMS user database, but it is an extra step to change ownership to a group and/or set a group as collaborators.

Groups are also a powerful tool for other Kaltura modules / features that allow to you configure user access (Reach, for example), but there is no denying that roles, channel entitlements, media ownership, and groups are are a complex ecosystem to wrap you brain around.

To address the issue of changing media ownership to a group for media already uploaded, a KMC admin can do this in bulk. For example, I might filter the KMC to show me all the media in Channel A, select all that media in the KMC, then use the bulk tools to change the owner to a group (group must already exist).

Now enter the KAF (LMS integration). KAF connects to your LMS (Canvas in our case) as an LTI Tool. This means that KAF itself doesn't manage user roles. Instead, it gets the user's role from the LMS. Unlike KMS, your role in the LMS might change from course to course (teacher, TA, student, admin, etc). The groups you create in KMS, however, will still work with your KAF config. I won't go down that road here right now, except to say that we use this a lot for media ownership/collaborators, and for REACH configs in the KAF.

My advice is to set aside some time, cuddle up with a sandbox KMS and experiment with these features until they gel in your mind. When you figure out a path that works for you, write it down so you remember how and why you set things up the way you did, then carry the config over to your production site.

thomas_ellis

Hey @ckong11 . I'm not aware of any plans at the moment for that. Can you elaborate on the use case a little more? Are you working in multiple LMS's and wanting shared repo content to co-reside in both places? There are some workflows and/or some custom modules that may be able to get you what you're looking for.

ckong11

Thanks for replying back @thomas_ellis ! We would only need a shared repo within each LMS, so we don't need the shared repo to be available in both LMS's (i.e. if a Canvas share repo can be viewable in Moodle).

So my current use case is a group of instructional designers, who do not have KMC access, are working within Canvas. Some designers are in charge of creating the media content and uploading them into Kaltura (ideally into a shared repo) and another set of designers are in charge of embedding the content within the Canvas sites via the RCE Kaltura embed media button. On occasion, they may publish the media to the Canvas course Media Gallery.

mkraft

@ckong11 we use a combination of Mediaspace groups with this workflow. It works because the media space exists on the same KMC as the KAF. Once the groups are created and populated using the method you prefer group members can assign media ownership or collaborator roles to the group rather than to individual people. This causes the media to show up in the group members' personal my media library.

TThis works because the authentication and user identification between the KAF and and the KMS is the same and caldera will carry those groups forward into the KAF

We prefer this approach because the KAF shared repository doesn't provide the deep permissioning and other controls that we would rather see there. It's a little extra work in the outset and a little extra work for the users because they have to manage media ownership or collaborators, but it keeps the media in the purview of the desired users.

ckong11

@mkraft !!! I wonder if I am not setting this up correctly.

I created a channel in MediaSpace, but the highest level I can add someone is Manager, as the channel can only have one owner. I then added individual users as members to the channel with the role of Manager. Then I loaded the channel with some videos, but when I go to each video, go to Edit and select Collaboration, I don't see the members listed. And when I had someone log into the LMS and check their My Media, they did not see the videos from the channel listed.

I'm hoping I don't have to go to each media and click on Collaboration and add a bunch of IDs. Especially if someone is newly onboarded and should have access to all media in the channel.

thomas_ellis

@ckong11 , if you reach out to your account manager and ask for a session with a Solutions Engineer, we can help walk you through multiple options to see what best fits your needs 🙂. @mkraft made some great points, and there’s also potential to leverage some additional modules like categorymemberscollaboration and kafchannelpublishing to potentially further streamline some of your workflows.

ckong11

OH MY GOSH!! THANK YOU SO MUCH@mkraft!! This is super useful. We did create a group in KAF and I see I can change the media owner to be the group (WOWOWOW this was the workflow I was missing).

I am also thinking of having the group create a channel in the KMS and add the group members with the role of collaborators. That way they can upload all things that need to be shared there and someone with KMC access can quickly locate the media and bulk change the owner role.

@thomas_ellis thanks for the tip about reaching out and asking for a session with a Solution Engineer. I may have to do this if I want to think of an automated way to change the media owner from a person to a group.

thomas_ellis

@ckong11 , if you use a MediaSpace channel, then you could leverage the categorymemberscollaboration module to have member of the channel with a certain role (like MODERATOR for example) be automatically added as co-editor and/or co-publisher to any piece of content that is published to that channel.

mkraft

https://community.kaltura.com/discussion/comment/950#Comment_950

@thomas_ellis This is not a built-in module. Is it something you can request without cost to be added to a KMS? We've been achieving a similar end result by manually changing ownership to a group when the media is uploaded. Is there a categorymembersowner module? That would make for a timesaver for some of our workflows.