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JA-SIG Newsletter - December 2007
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1 Welcome
1.1 Editor's Message
Welcome to the December 2007 issue of the JA-SIG Newsletter.
In addition to the usual project updates, this month's content includes announcements regarding the JA-SIG Spring Conference and the uPortal Board Liaison role. You will also find herein a few interesting job postings at Yale and an exciting opportunity with the Kuali Foundation, and an insightful commentary on uPortal by our Acting Executive Director, Jonathan Markow.
Special thanks go to Andrew Petro, Jim Helwig and Jonathan Markow for helping me out with the content for this month.
As always, feel free to send your comments or content to newsletter at ja-sig dot org.
Happy Holidays!
~mark_rogers@mac.com Mark Mark (University of Manitoba - Home of the Vanier Cup Champions!)
Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter
2 Project Updates
2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
Progress is currently being made on CAS 3.1.2, including:
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Contributed by:
Scott Battaglia (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, JA-SIG Central Authentication Service
2.2 uPortal
News item about release of uPortal 2.6.1 general audience release:
I am pleased to announce the availability of the "general audience" release of uPortal 2.6.1. This release is available for immediate download from the uPortal website and is tagged in SVN.
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Speaking of migrations, to DLM and otherwise, Unicon's Drew Wills has been continuing exciting work of late (including work undertaken on behalf of Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and others) to improve open source tooling for import, export, and migration of uPortal data, which is expected to ease the migration path to the upcoming uPortal 3 release.
Contributed by:
~awp9 Andrew Petro, uPortal 2.6.1 release engineer
3 Community News and Events
3.1 JA-SIG Spring Conference 2008
------------- Hold the Dates! ---------------
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Watch for registration information and Call for Proposals in January.
3.2 JA-SIG-Related Sakai Conference Presentation
At this month's Sakai conference in Newport Beach, California, Dan McCallum and Andrew Petro, both of Unicon, Inc., presented on their having investigated potential for re-use of and integration with JA-SIG software in the Sakai collaboration and learning environment. Andrew emphasizes that Dan deserves credit for the technical heavy lifting involved. The investigated integration, available via Sakai "contrib" shared source control, explores programmatic integration with JA-SIG CAS and JA-SIG PersonDirectory services. This is a level of integration beyond that normally afforded in Sakai's support for e.g. use of CAS single sign on.
The presentation was well-received and included mention of additional opportunities for using other JA-SIG software in Sakai, including the Groups and Permissions framework that plays an important role in many production uPortal instances today and has been refactored, primarily through the efforts of Columbia's ~de3 Dan Ellentuck, to be available as a standalone library adoptable in projects beyond uPortal.
3.3 New uPortal Board Liaison
After a long stint of service and a terrific job, Bill Thompson is stepping down as uPortal Board Liaison. I'm happy to let you know that Jim Helwig has agreed to take over the responsibilities, effective January 1st. Jim will replace Bill on the uPortal Project Steering Committee (PSC) in this new capacity.
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Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Acting Executive Director
4 Other Events and Activities
4.1 EclipseCon 2008 (March 17-20, 2008)
Place: Santa Clara, California
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Source: EclipseCon 2008 Web Site - http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/
4.2 2008 JavaOne Conference (May 6-9, 2008)
Place: The Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
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Source: 2008 JavaOne Conference Web Site - http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/index.jsp
4.3 portal 2008 - measurement & assessment (June 3-6, 2008)
Place: Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
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For more information, see https://biz.gettysburg.edu/it/portal08/index.cfm
4.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 (October 28-31, 2008)
"Mark your calendar for the premier information technology event in higher education, EDUCAUSE 2008, October 28-31 in Orlando, Florida. The program 'Interaction, Ideas, Inspiration' will include preconference seminars; track and poster sessions; small group meetings; and corporate exhibits, presentations, and workshops. ... "
Source: EDUCAUSE 2008 Web Site - http://www.educause.edu/e08
5 Job Postings
5.1 Portal Job Openings at Yale University
With Yale's plans to build on their implementation of the University Portal project, two new positions within the Information Technology Services (ITS) organization have been created.
Technical Manager of Infrastructure Services
Reporting to the Director of Web Services, this hands-on position that manages a team of IT professionals with responsibility for strategic delivery of Web infrastructure services, and provides project management for a variety of complex Web infrastructure services projects of medium and large size and complexity that are central to the long-term success of Yale. Expected projects include the University Portal project.
Job details: https://sjobs.brassring.com/1033/asp/tg/cim_jobdetail.asp?jobId=188174
Web Systems Analyst
Reporting to the Technical Manager of Infrastructure Services unit within the Web Services department, participants in the strategic implementation and technical support of the University Portal and its related strategic technologies.
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Submitted by:
Roger V. Despres
Director of Web Services
Information Technology Services, Yale University
web: http://www.yale.edu/its/web/
5.2 Kuali Foundation Executive Director
The Kuali Foundation is hiring an Executive Director. The job posting may be found at http://kuali.org/news/ExecJobDescription.shtml
6 From the Blogosphere
6.1 "What Makes uPortal Unique?"
You may have seen a few posts on the uPortal lists, courtesy of Jim Helwig, Carl Jacobson, and Jonathan Markow, in response to the question, "What do you think is unique or special about portal requirements in the higher-ed space?". Acting Executive Director, Jonathan Markow, has fine-tuned his thoughts on the matter and posted them to his blog (with special thanks to Jim Helwig).
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