Subscription Manager
UWWI Subscription Manager
UW Technology has a concept called subscriptions which indicate the lifecycle
status any given UW NetID has with a particular service. Once a UWNetID has been
permitted for a subscription, it can then be enabled for that subscription.
Subsequently, it might be disabled.
Such assertions are made, which result in events being sent along to listener
services which are configured to listen to events from a given subscription.
These listener services act on the events in whatever form is appropriate for
the event. For example, an enable event might cause a UW NetID to be granted
authorization to a service. A disable event might cause a UW NetID to be denied
authorization. The details are really specific to whatever service is tied to
that subscription.
To be clear, the listener is code with some standard functionality, but with
a lot of custom code to take action on subscription events.
UWWI currently has two subscription listener services, but eventually these
will be merged into a single listener service.

In the diagram above, you can see both the Kiwi password management system
side-by-side with the Subscription management system as it relates to the UW
Windows Infrastructure. You can read elsewhere for
more on
the Kiwi components. In the description of the Kiwi components, you should
take note of a few references to subscriptions, and getting some basic services
activated based on your categories. And we'll talk about that next:
With respect to the diagram above, the "Manage
my NetID" page and various UW Technology Help Desk Tools make calls to the
Mango APIs in order to carry out requested actions. In the case of "Get Your UW
NetID" site, in addition to making the Mango calls necessary to send events
through the Kiwi system, events are also propagated through the subscription
system. Some subscriptions are automatically permitted and enabled based on the
underlying category of the UW NetID. Categories are not something well
documented, so we won't go into great detail, but they correspond to your status
with regard to the university. When your university status changes, your
category does too, and some of your subscription's status will change
automatically as a result.
Currently UWWI has two subscriptions it listens to, however, this is expected
to change over time.
One subscription is for the Catalyst general computing labs. For that
subscription, the Mango API calls a special process called "w2ks" which in turn
talks directly to a special subscription listener that is integrated into
Fuzzy_Kiwi. For that subscription, this results in a change in group membership
for a group called 'Catalyst Labs Authorized'. The Catalyst labs then permit
local login to this group which enables them to only permit those people who
should have access to lab computers. How a given UW NetID gets into this
particular subscription depends on their status. If they are staff or faculty,
they are included. If they are a student and have paid the Tech Fee, then they
are included. And again, those details are captured by the categories associated
with any given UW NetID.
The other subscription is for the UW Exchange service. For that subscription,
a special web service listens for events sent from the Subscription Service.
When a UW NetID is enabled for that subscription, a mailbox is created, user
account attributes are provisioned, and support group detail is set. Likewise,
when a UW NetID is disabled for that subscription, the mailbox is deleted, user
account attributes are removed, and the support group detail is removed.
In the future, the Catalyst subscription will move to this dedicated web
service listener, and we expect that there may be clients who might want to make
use of this Subscription listener web service for services they run.