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1. Message from the Editor

Hi everyone. 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, via email to jayshao@rutgers.edu for consideration in the next issue. Please include a subject line containing: NEWSLETTER-CONTRIBUTION with any contributions.

Jason Shao
Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

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2. JA-SIG Membership

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.

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Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair

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3. JA-SIG 2007 Summer Conference (With Altitude! - Denver, CO)

JA-SIG With Altitude!
June 24-27, 2007
Denver CO, USA

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Susan Bramhall
JA-SIG 2007 Summer Conference Committee Chair

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4. Recent Changes to the JA-SIG Server and Clearinghouse

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.

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Aaron Godert
Cornell University

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5. User Experience Initiatives

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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6. Unicon 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: 2.5.4 update

A 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 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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10. JA-SIG With Altitude: Call For Proposals

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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11. Job Posting: Rutgers - Consulting Application Developer

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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12. Job Posting: Rutgers - Application Developer

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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13. Job Posting: Unicon - Software Engineer I

Unicon is seeking to hire a Software Engineer. Listing: http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?1226