(This is the final feature list that is derived from the rough draft and brochure feature list)
uPortal Platform Features
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uPortal's flexible,enterprise-grade APIs allow adopters to cleanly extend the portal to meet local requirements and integrate with other campus services. A modular architecture maintains a separation between portal and portlet code, resulting in a lightweight deployment with separately upgradeable components. uPortal brings many enhancements to the platform's core framework, includingFeatures include:
- JSR-268 (Portlet 2.0) and Spring 3.0 support
- New extensible Extensible rendering pipeline with improved performance and caching
- Updated base skin and JavaScript standardization
- Improved internationalization Internationalization support
- REST APIs exposing read-access to uPortal users, groups, and permissions
- Flexible theme and skin customization with a modern default skin included
- User subscription to pre-formatted tabs
- Support for multiple international languages (English, French, etc...)
- Scalable for enterprise deployments and proven to scale Proven scalability up to at least 8 million users. Portal supports
- Support for clustering and the hosting of multiple portals from a single installation.
- Support for many popular databases, including Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server
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Ready support for popular authentication sources include: Jasig Central Authentication Service (CAS), Internet2 Shibboleth, PubCookie, Active Directory, OpenLDAP, Novell eDirectory, and JDBC.
The Person directory Directory API allows the portal to consume user attribute information from multiple sources, including OpenLDAP, Microsoft Active directory, and custom databases.
Security and Privacy
uPortal ensures security by following current best practices to guard against SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. User attributes and data from remote sources are not copied into the uPortal database, protecting the privacy of uPortal users and preventing the proliferation of sensitive data across campus databases.
Groups and Permissions
uPortal uses a highly performant and extensible Group API allowing the portal to consume and combine group data from multiple sources, including LDAP, Active Directory, Grouper, and custom databases. Group membership can also be dynamically determined by applying logic to user attributes. uPortal also includes an exceptionally powerful authorization system used to determine user's layout, content, and allowed actions.
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Updates to portal administration in uPortal 4 make it simpler than ever to create, assign, and manage groups, permissions, and content. Many of these functions can be delegated. Updated user management portlet provides an integrated dashboard for viewing, managing, and impersonating users. You can even easily publish portlets and use portlet-specifc specific rich configuration screens. The portlet life-cycle can be automated or performed manually.
User Experience
uPortal 4 boasts an impressive feature set that allows institutions to create a rich, accessible (WCAG-2.0 AA compliant) user experience for faculty, students, and staff. A sophisticated layout management merges administrator-defined content with user customization making both administrator-managed and user-editable. uPortal provides the following experience for users:
- Unified customization interface for adding content and selecting skins and layouts
- Drag and drop layout reordering
- Updated skins
- Aggregation, compression, and caching user interface resources for improved browser performance
- Compliance with the WCAG-2.0 AA standard (accessibility features include a table-free layout, keyboard interactions, valid markup, and ARIA roles)
- Enhanced flyout menus with simplified CSS
- Mobile access offering web-based and native app experiences for a wide variety of mobile devices
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-customized content. Users can optionally subscribe to a pre-defined tab of content. Users can customize their layout through drag and drop rearranging, changing their skin, add/delete/move tabs, and easily find and add new content. Advanced search features and enhanced fly-out menus make navigation easy.
Mobile Access
uPortal comes delivered offering a mobile-friendly theme and skin that is optimized for smart phones. The new uMobile project is a 100% free and open source that provides a native app for iPhone and Android devices that will further enhance the portal experience. For more information, see <link to uMobile>
Branding
Higher education institutions can brand their uPortal instance through highly customizable themes and skins. Each layer of uPortal's rendering pipeline provides flexibility for institutional customization. The user manual and inline documentation guide developers, while developer-centric tools can disable caching and add debugging resources during the development lifecycle Web designers can easily customize the skin without any Java/uPortal expertise.
Statistics and Auditing
uPortal includes a database-persistent event logger capable of tracking large amounts of information about portal usage. Activities that are supported out of the box include user sessions, portlet interactions, layout customizations, portlet rendering times, and more. uPortal flexibility also allows campuses to configure additional logging events.
Portlet Development and Deployment
Successful enterprise portals portlets deliver compelling integrations with campus services, combing diverse IT resources to create a unified, personalized user experience. uPortal delivers content through pre-configured portlet types and optional portlets.
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Pre-configured Portlet Types
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uPortal includes generic, reusable publishing types, allowing administrators to easily create user-subscribable content. These built-in portlet types include:
- Web Proxy (with content clipping and authentication)
- RSS
- Simple Content Management (WYSIWYG editor)
- Bookmarks
- IFrames
- SQL Graphing (for statistics and auditing)
- Images
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Optional Portlets
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Jasig sponsored portlets are modularized using well-defined standard portlet APIs. They will run in any JSR-168 compliant portal and can be upgraded separately from the uPortal platform itself. Jasig portlets share a focus on performance, security, and integration, and all sponsored portlets make use of common Jasig libraries for browser-side caching of user interface resources and validation of user input. Currently available Jasig portlets include:
- Announcements
- Bookmarks
- Calendar
- Dictionary/Thesaurus
- Email Preview
- Google Maps
- LTI integration
- Search
- Translation
- Weather
Community Resources and Support
In addition to robust functionality and advanced technology, many community resources are available through the Jasig community of expert portal developers and enthusiasts.
Benefits of leveraging the Jasig community include:
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For a complete list of available portlets see http://www.jasig.org/portlets