Page Comparison

Anchor
item-

...

1 item-

...

1

1. Message from the Editor

Welcome from the Editor: Introductions, schedule, contents and how to submit

...

Jason Shao
Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

Anchor
item-

...

2 item-

...

2

...

2. JA-SIG Membership

At the recent semi-annual JA-SIG conference in Atlanta, the board introduced a new membership program. For the first time in our seven-year history (and our first year as a non-profit, 501(c)3 corporation), institutions and commercial affiliates will be invited to join the organization as Members. We expect the program to strengthen JA-SIG in two significant ways. First, membership fees will help ensure sustainability and growth of the work we do. Secondly, organizations that join will be provided with avenues to participate in the strategic direction and operations of JA-SIG initiatives in a more formal way.

We will keep you informed of the progress of the membership program in future newsletters. If you have questions, please feel free to email us at membership@ja-sig.org.

We would like to thank the following organizations for their early commitment to joining the program:

Institutional Members:
Cornell University, Dalhousie University, Duke University, Indiana University, Princeton University, Queens University, Rutgers University, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Hull, University of Winnipeg, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Delaware, University of Michigan, University of Valenciennes, University of Rennes, University of California, Irvine, University of Guelph, University of Manitoba, Virginia Tech, York University

Commercial Affiliates:
Unicon

Princeton, NJ - January 24, 2007 - JA-SIG, the non-profit organization focusing on the sharing of open technology in higher education, today announced a new membership program and benefits designed to attract worldwide educational institutions and commercial supporters of its enterprise open source applications, including: uPortal, CAS (Centralized Authentication Service), and HyperContent (the full-featured web content management application). The uPortal Project has reached new levels of maturity as adoption continues and technology contributions are received from institutions and commercial partners. With this increasing market penetration, JA-SIG is expanding its membership outreach and program benefits to support additional organizational growth, increased institutional participation, and broader commercial support. Membership information can be found at: http://www.JA-SIG.org/membership.html and the uPortal software can be downloaded at: http://uportal.org/release/allReleases.html.

As the uPortal community expands globally, it is important that the JA-SIG organization grows and evolves in order to best serve the community, our institutional members, and commercial affiliates. The success of our new membership program will allow us to provide the product development planning and organizational structure needed to maintain uPortal, and our other applications, as robust open source alternatives to proprietary software. And, our members will now be able to actively participate in the organization by nominating and voting on board members and by serving on project steering committees.

Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair

Anchor
item-

...

3 item-

...

3

4. JA-SIG 2006 Winter Conference (Atlanta, GA)

The most-often heard complaint at the JA-SIG Winter Conference in Atlanta this December was that there was too much choice – too many good topics to choose from in too few time slots. With three presentation tracks and a BOF/Seminar track, the two days of the conference went by too fast for many, with not enough time for face-to-face meetings, discussions, debates, and just catching-up with colleagues. The presentation materials for all the track sessions are being collected in the wiki, arranged according to the program schedule for easy identification.

...

Paul Zablosky
JA-SIG 2006 Winter Conference Committee Chair

5. Unicon's Announces New Cooperative Support Program for uPortal

Unicon, Inc. recently introduced a new uPortal Cooperative Support Program for higher education. It features a dedicated team of expert development and technical support specialists for uPortal to provide direct technical support and assistance to individual subscriber institutions in the program. This new program is consistent with the open source philosophy of contributing features and fixes towards the overall progress of uPortal, as the resulting enhancements will be shared with the open source community. It also addresses individual institution's need for a predictable cost support solution for uPortal.

Support issues are managed on a priority basis with an escalation mechanism available for high priority issues. All development work performed by the team will be undertaken in direct participation uPortal open source Web portal initiative. The uPortal Cooperative Support Program is a strong complement to Unicon's professional services for uPortal which include various bundled services comprised of implementation, project planning, installation, configuration, branding, and training components. More information is available at: http://www.unicon.net/support_1123.html.

Unicon

Anchor
item-5 item-5

5. uPortal: 3.0-RC1, 2.

...

5.4 update

uPortal 3.0.0-RC1 was released on the 27th of November. This release is a significant step for the uPortal 3 project. The portal framework is near functional completeness. This functionality includes simple layout managment, full groups and permissions support, functional layout management with Drag and Drop support, bookmarkable tabs and a large number of internal bug and feature enhancements. There are also a core set of functional portlets included in the release which provide Web Proxying, XSLT, InlineFrame and Bookmarks along with a uPortal 2 IChannel adapter. The RC1 is ready for people to download and work with in a testing and pilot environment. Short term plans are focused on working with people piloting the framework to address bugs found in the RC. Medium term plans include a refactoring effort to use Maven 2, migration to Pluto 1.1 and import/export utilities for initial data population. Longer term plans include porting DLM to uPortal 3. There is a RC2 release planned for mid-January 2007 which will mainly focus on bug fixes from the previous month of work with pilot institutions.

Eric Dalquist
uPortal 3 Release Engineer

Additionally: Jan Nielson from Sunguard HE has accepted the role of Release Engineer for the work towards uPortal 2.6 upon completion of his commitment for Sungard's Luminus IV platform. uPortal 2.6 represents the collection of various work currently undergoing in the HEAD of the uportal 2.x CVS tree. It is expected to include features like JMX metrics, XHMTL/CSS skins, DLM as the default layout manager, and a number of stability and performance improvements. Andrew Petro has also continued to organize the maintenance of the uPortal 2.5.x branch, releasing a 2.5.3 release, and beginning the process of producing a 2.5.4 release to include various fixes and patches contributed from the community.

– JasonA hearty welcome to Paul Gazda as a new uPortal committer. Thanks to Drew Wills, UnionSecurityContext now supports computing the union of any ISecurityContext implementations, and not just ChainingSecurityContext subclasses. Thanks to Cris Holdorph, uPortal 2.5.4 and uPortal 2.6 will compile under JDK 6 by virtue of his enhancements to RDBMServices. Eric Dalquist has begun soliciting volunteers for hosting the next uPortal Developers' Meeting and persons interested in attending should look out for a date/location announcement.

Andrew Petro
uPortal 2.5.x Release Engineer

Anchor
item-6 item-6

6. Hypercontent 2.1-RC1

...