As a Group Manager: Registration of a Group / Virtual Organisation (VO)¶

Check If You Need a VO¶

You may need a so-called “Virtual Organisation” (VO), if you

want to manage multiple users, in hierarchical groups, for multiple services, and/or
want to include users outside of Helmholtz.

This comes with a bit of overhead. Simple shares via links etc. may be more handy, depending on your use case.

In order to request and register a new VO, you need to fulfil some conditions:

You and a secondary manager must be employees of a Helmholtz Center.
For VO manager(s), multi-factor authentication (MFA) is mandatory. See here on how to enable this for you.
Management rights can also be further delegated or distributed within the group, where needed.
You must comply with the Helmholtz AAI policies and related duties of VO Management.

Log in to our Service database ‘Plony’ and click on ‘VO Registration / New Application’.
Provide the requested basic information: VO name, brief description, manager and security contacts; optionally an Acceptable Use Policy.
You will have the chance to save a draft, and send immediately or later.

You can find a detailed step-by-step instruction for the Plony application here.

After submission, we will get in touch with you, while setting up the VO or if something is missing.

Once granted, you can now manage your VO, i.e., add/remove people, roles, and sub-groups, as decribed here.