readers.conf and authentication question

[g.lams at itcilo.it]

Hi
We are developing a software, called the Course Reader ( http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/coursereader , we are already working on the second release), which.
- creates an educational environment that allows people to participate in 
courses via computer communications
- technically is a newsgroup reader which should read from any newsgroup 
server that is NNTP compliant.

Untill now we used Dnews but we would to have a complete open source 
solution so I downloaded and installed INN-2.4.0, created a conference 
(for the time being with full anonymous access), and was able to connect 
using the Course Reader and sending message.
I'm trying to implement the access control part. In our case, each created 
newsgroup corresponds to a course with a certain number of participant, 
each participant having his/her own username and password.

I would like to know what could be the better way of managing those users 
and their passwords (I don't want to use the system shadow password file). 
Also, as those usernames and passwords need to be managed not by myself, 
but by 2 "teachers", I wonder whether someone has implementated a 
web-based management system, even a basic one.

Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated

Gaël