Is there a way for me to store and/or report off of a group description in Managed Reporting. Say my group name is a short name and I'd like to have a description of the group - so I'd like to store it and also create a report that lists all the groups and their respective descriptions.

that's supposed to be in the section of the mpv.xml in worp/conf. (according to page 5 of the handout for 'advanced Dashboard Customization Techniques', summit 07).
but in my install (which is unix) the description given for each of the shortnames in that file is utter and complete gibberish.
how useful!

You can edit (USING CAUTION) the files in basedir to get them to be what you need with nicer names. I also saw a post a while back with a Master and code for reading from the mrrepos.htm file for reporting on the MRE structure. You can probably find it using the Search tab.

There isn't really an easy way to control how the Managed Reporting sets itself up, so you get what you get and can manually change it afterwards if you want.

Thanks - I'm not sure I was clear in my original post. I will give an example of what I am trying to do. If let's say I want name a group: GROUP_A but would like have a description called "Users who can run Set A of reports" and then a group called GROUP_B with a description of "Users who can update Table 1" etc. Then I'd like to be able to run a report and see:

Group Description
...
with the listing

what we're saying is that, as far as we know, you have to do that yourself, reading the underlying files. There's no quick fix, unless someone wickedly wise comes along and teaches us all.

Hmmmm... Oh well! Thanks for the info.

Please open a NFR case if you would like a Group 'Description' property added so that you can provide detail info about the MR Group in addition to the Group Name. If you do please post the case number so I can charter it as I'm working with programming on MR repository metadata additions for the next major NF Release after the 76x release track.
For creating reports on the MR repository metadata see the MR Admin Guide chapter "Managed Reporting Extract Utility".