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uPortal's mobile friendly theme
Jenn demonstrated a portal instance she wrote running uPortal that displays well on a mobile device. Base uPortal detects user agent and routes you to the correct theme. Displays list for navigation instead of tabs.
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- 3G+ available is spotty in areas
- need to look at how much you really deliver on each page
- might be interesting in writing an app that consumes a feed from a uPortal instance (I am not sure what AndrewP was getting at here); nice out of the box eye candy might be valuable marketing
- need to get vendor buy in from those providing services on campus
- need to identify low hanging fruit
- while automatically directing users to the 'right' version based on user agent, they may actually want a specific version. do we specifically ask them each time? Do we store their preference?
- Need to look at making data available to others that want to make devices
- Students are expecting APIs to their academic data
- what about security on mobile devices? SSL is now supported on modern smart phones
- are their social problems that now arise with the wide spread use of mobile devices
Observations
- there has been an increase in mobile-focused sites, but these are also becoming popular on regular PCs because they are simple and easy to use
- there is interest in both browser based solutions and native apps; perhaps we should focus on open standards that can increase integration with other apps on the phone
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- m.rpi.edu
- m.mit.edu
- mobile.usc.edu
- m.iu.edu
Next steps
- support for user mobile profiles