Best Practises

All great questions as usual ludo. User administration in A6 and below has to be done custom / with getting other projects. This was done intentionally so that I wouldn't get overwhelmed with support questions locally from people adopting too early (unfortunate reality). The next version (actually the stuff in dev right now) has some simple user management as well as will provide the ability to import users in bulk via csv file. Imports are managed via feeds so they are very easy to reconfigure.

The Space setting of either OER or private determines if access control is needed at all for users. OER is totally open, user enrollment to it isn't going to do much. Section info and workflow stuff in general is also being cleaned up, those are CCK values. The only thing that's taxonomy in the system is what department something is associated to. The section info helps to build the path in a structured way though that field is not required. I may end up dropping it and keep it as specific functionality to the psu build for reasons you just mentioned.

ELMS site is just an organic group, so basically all content you create while in a site knows it's part of that site. Same will go for users, any user you add will know its part of the currently active group. OG really is just for lumping together content / users and saying they are related. Spaces, allows for a bundling of default settings (like public group that has these 2 features turned on). Features, are bundling of Drupal functionality at some logical layer. In the case of elms, this is elms_content and elms_id_best_practice driving most of the experience when in a site. There are a lot of other Features ELMS ships with that currently are not enabled because they are dev (as of Alpha6) and that's still the case in alpha7.

If you delete CCK fields or anything you can always restore them by going into site building - features , and looking at what things say they've been overridden. You can always revert a feature to get it's original factory default settings back.

Please continue posting the things that are confusing and I'll keep trying to address them in the new build / issue queue. At the end of the day, this is all Drupal so if you find other modules you like there's a good chance they'll 'just work' without anything special needing to be done.

Core of the system I didn't build and has been used in production in gov / edu / large orgs for two years or so (Open Atrium). Drupal core is a rock, it's mostly the fact that I go on vacation soon / am testing the drupal.org packaging scripts.

Might need to tweak a value related in the access control modules as to who has control but yes that should also be possible. Please see http://drupal.org/node/765832 about how to use multiple access control modules together (technically that would be hidden nodes, TAC and OG)

"Back to the hum drum stuff, used contexts to add the Group details block to my version but cant find any blocks that relate to user management i.e. add user."

User management is coming in the next release or you can grab the dev of drupal.org/project/elms_features as it's in there and try to get things applied correctly based on dev versions though I don't recommend it necessarily :)

Suggest you upgrade/roll to elms beta and see how you like the differences / if anything's cleared up