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WelcomeJA-SIG Updates2. JA-SIG Membership Project Updates7. uPortal Upcoming Events10. Conference CFP Job Postings11. Rutgers - Consulting Application Developer |
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from the Editor
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Hi everyone. I've been involved for several years in the JA-SIG uPortal community, and am pleased to be able to help share some of the various activities and news from many quarters. This newsletter is expected to be published monthly, towards the middle of the month and is intended to communicate information of interest to JA-SIG members including: JA-SIG news, project updates, and upcoming events. If anyone has items which they feel would be This is the second monthly newsletter, and the first one with a Job Postings section. If your institution or company has available positions which you'd like to advertise among the JA-SIG community, please submit them, along with any other items of interest to the JA-SIG membership, they may via email them to jayshao@rutgers.edu for consideration for in the next issue. Please include a subject line containing: NEWSLETTER-CONTRIBUTION with any contributions.
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Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair
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3. JA-SIG
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2007 Summer Conference (
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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.
Memorable highlights include:
- The uPortal 3 Roadmap: & announcement of Release Candidate 1
- New governance plans and membership structure: 21 institutions having already signed up at the time of the conference.
- User Experience and User Interface issues: Strong interest in user experience issues, including a visit by the very ambitious FLUID Project, which plans to build rich technical solutions to user-interface and accessibility challenges across projects/technologies.
- Partnerships with other community source efforts: Sakai, Kuali Rice, and Kuali Student were all well represented at the conference.
- AJAX: The program included a pair of sessions on AJAX, which turned out to be a popular choice for many attendees.
- Commercial Support: Unicon has announced the availability of support contracts for JA-SIG open-source products.
In addition to the usual crowd of dedicated JA-SIG members, there was a gratifyingly-large number of first-time participants at the conference. Overall the mood of the conference was one of energy, enthusiasm, optimism, and commitment; promising great new advances in the coming year. For those who attended, what did you think of the conference? What was the high point for you? Why not share your impressions with your colleagues at the JA-SIG Conference Planning wiki space? There's a good chance that the program committee will read your comments and use your ideas in planning next conference, scheduled for June 2007 in Denver.
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With Altitude! - Denver, CO)
JA-SIG With Altitude!
June 24-27, 2007
Denver CO, USA
The JA-SIG conference committee is proud to announce this year's summer conference Sunday through Wednesday, 24-27 June 2007 at the Renaissance Denver Hotel, Denver, Colorado. There are several exciting changes this year! More sessions, more seminars, more time to network and an additional track specifically for Sakai. http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/07summer/index.html
The conference has been expanded by an additional day with more time for networking and additional presentations Wednesday morning followed by optional afternoon post-conference in-depth seminars. We will begin as usual on Sunday with a number of exciting half and full day pre-conference seminars and the Sunday evening reception for all attendees. Regular one hour sessions, kiosks and BOFs will run from Monday morning through Wednesday at noon. This expansion will allow for more sessions, possible encores of some sessions, as well as more interaction and collaboration for all attendees. Wednesday afternoon we will offer several half day post-conference seminars.
To whet your appetite here is a preview of some of the seminars to be offered:
- AJAX: A full day seminar by Sang Shin, Java Technology Evangelist and Architect at Sun Microsystems
- Kuali: The ins and outs of the Kuali suite over the course of a full day seminar.
- CAS: A half day soup to nuts CAS seminar by Rutgers University.
- Sakai: Introducing Sakai: A half day seminar by Anthony Whyte on Sakai's Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE)
Susan Bramhall
JA-SIG 2007 Summer Conference Committee Chair
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The JA-SIG Server and Clearinghouse team has been busy doing some clean-up work on the server that houses the various JA-SIG web-based collaboration tools. We recently received some much needed extra disk space when the Univesity of Wisconsin at Madison donated hard drives to JA-SIG. In collaboration with Princeton, who hosts and maintains the server, we were able to increase our capacity by 54G. In addition, the team and board members are working to put together a grant, which would provide us additional hardware for JA-SIG's anticipated membership growth.
You may have also noticed some recent changes with the JA-SIG Clearinghouse software. It is no longer represented by a uPortal instance and has been migrated to a set of wiki pages in our Confluence instance. A link to the new site along with a more detailed explanation of why we made this change, can be found here - http://clearinghouse.ja-sig.org/. The team looks at this solution as an interim one and will soon be engaging the JA-SIG community about a "Next Generation Clearinghouse" and any ideas that you may have.
Other clean-up work includes upgrades to JIRA and Confluence, decommissioning of unused infrastructure, consolidation of duplicate services, installation of new services, and that's only the beginning!
Aaron Godert
Cornell University
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The JA-SIG Winter 2006 conference unveiled several promising user experience currents. Foremost was the first release candidate of uPortal 3. This next version of uPortal lays the foundation for significant improvements in the user experience of the portal including support for the highly-touted AJAX and one of its popular by-products, drag-and-drop. Kudos to Peter Kharchenko for his work in implementing the drag-and-drop. Other user experience gains were made in the uPortal 3 theme regarding Web standards, accessibility, and improved usability - big thanks to Shawn Lonas for his work on the uPortal 3 theme. All of these improvements map up to the uPortal 3 user experience goals (http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/z0E). If you are interested in AJAX, drag-and-drop, Web standards, accessibility, or usability, join the user experience email list (details follow) and participate in the user experience activity on the JA-SIG wiki ( http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/OEo).
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The User Experience Birds of a Feather at the Winter conference was well attended, demonstrating the desire of the community to improve uPortal's user experience. I encourage you to view the notes from the UE BoF here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/cUo. User experience discussion now has an official home! Any and all user experience topics can now be discussed on the JA-SIG user experience email list (jasig-ue@lists.ja-sig.org). To join, go to: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/40k. I look forward to hearing from you.
Gary Thompson
Unicon
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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
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7. uPortal:
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2.5.4 update
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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.
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uPortal 3 Release EngineerA 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
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8. Hypercontent
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The Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) is proud to announce a release candidate for version 2.1 of HyperContent, a web and portlet content management system that scales from workgroups to the enterprise. This release candidate is available in a pre-integrated bundle with uPortal 2.5.3 and CAS 3.0.5, forming a trio of JA-SIG products that delivers an out-of-the-box solution for enterprise portal, content management and single sign-on. HyperContent 2.1 takes a new role in this architecture via its new JSR-168 portlet, offering direct presentation and in-place editing of portlet content.
HyperContent 2.1 offers a raft of new features on top of the robust web content management and publishing architecture introduced a year ago in version 2.0, including search based collections, file browsing for links and images, portlet editing and publishing, blog support, and much more! The new release also contains a starter project that gives you a solid base from which to build web sites of any size and structure using best practices. A documentation effort is currently underway to make it easier than ever to get up and running with HyperContent.
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Website
The Hypercontent website is in the midst of a rework in it's Information Architecture which should serve to highlight some of the features of recent releases.
Alex Vigdor
Hypercontent Architect & Lead Developer
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9. CAS: Server 3.1m1, 3.0.7, Documentation Efforts
On January 24th, 2007, the JA-SIG CAS project released CAS Server 3.1 Milestone 1, a technology preview of its next major release. This preview includes a re-architected web tier to support multiple authentication protocols concurrently. Milestone 1 demonstrates this capability by being able to speak both the CAS protocol and the SAML 1.1 protocol. With support for SAML 1.1, comes the ability to send attributes about the user back to the client application. The newest CAS Client for Java 3.1 Milestone 1 demonstrates this with its ability to "speak" SAML 1.1. Note that as these releases are technology previews, and are thus "sneak peaks", they are not intended for production use. The upcoming Milestone 2 of the CAS Server 3.1 will include better support for managing Services that use CAS.
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Scott Battaglia
CAS Server 3.0 Lead Developer
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Deadline for submission of proposals for half or full day seminars: Feb 7, 2007
Deadline for submission of proposals for regular one hour sessions: March 7, 2007
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Proposal forms, topic suggestions, and contact information are provided on the JA-SIG Conference Website. Submit your proposal and join the JA-SIG crowd in Denver this June!
For all the details, visit http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/07summer/index.html
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Rutgers is in the process of hiring an individual to manage ongoing identity management and middleware (including portal) initiatives. The position is both hands-on technical, and involves planning and project management. Listing: http://uhr.rutgers.edu/jobpostings/aps/Detail.asp?id=06-001297
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Rutgers is looking to add a developer to the middleware (including portal) team. Listing: http://uhr.rutgers.edu/jobpostings/aps/Detail.asp?id=06-001365
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Unicon is seeking to hire a Software Engineer. Listing: http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?1226