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Open Source Enterprise Information Portal

Higher education institutions offer an increasing amount of resources and services to all of their communities via the Web. Leveraging the right portal technology can transform the online campus into an essential vehicle for achieving and driving the institution's academic mission and critical initiatives. Enterprise information portals (EIP) strategically ease this complexity through unified, customized, and contextualized user experiences. Portals enforce the institution brand while centralizing access to campus services, academics, financial records, announcements and campus-wide alerts, campus news feeds, and more.

Selecting the appropriate framework is an exercise in determining which portal solution has the optimum fit for the campus and provides the level of control that the IT department requires.

A Powerful, Flexible Horizontal Integration Platform
uPortal® is a secure, horizontal integration platform designed to integrate and aggregate information from multiple applications. uPortal provides three fundamental components: enterprise framework, portlets (rendered as small windows of content that appear on a portal page), and development tools.

Looking to the Future through uPortal
uPortal 4.0 is the latest version of the only portal built by higher education, for higher education. It is one of the most widely deployed open source enterprise information portal platforms, having been adopted by hundreds of institutions and research communities worldwide. uPortal is designed to grow as the institution grows. It can be tailored to deliver valuable services throughout the complete student life cycle, and to provide a dashboard view of analytics to faculty and staff.

Inside Cover

Enterprise Integration Requires Highly Powerful, Flexible, and Scalable Technology

uPortal is vendor neutral neutral, requiring no particular vendor products. It is based on open standards and Java development best practices, supports both JSR-286 (Portlet 2.0) and JSR-168 (Portlet 1.0) standards, and can leverage existing investment in authentication, SIS, RDBMS, application server, and other infrastructure. uPortal is highly scalable for enterprise deployments and is proven to scale up to at least 2 million users. The portal features technologies for successful enterprise integration and content aggregation, including technologies for a powerful core framework, flexible layouts, interface customization, user experience, authentication and security, portal administration, groups and permissions, and mobile access.

Core Framework Features
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 4 brings many enhancements to the platform’s core framework, including:

• JSR-286 (Portlet 2.0) and Spring 3.0 support
• New extensible rendering pipeline with improved performance and caching
• Updated  base skin and JavaScript standardization
• Improved internationalization support
• REST APIs (exposing read access to uPortal users, groups, and permissions)
• User subscription to pre-formatted tabs
• Support for multiple international languages (English, French, etc.)
  

Flexible Layouts
uPortal's sophisticated layout management merges administrator-defined content with user customization. Portal tabs may be both administrator-managed and user-editable, via drag and drop layout customization featuring alternate keyboard interactions. Layout, including tabs, is determined by personal user attributes and group memberships.

Interface Customization
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.

User Experience
uPortal 4 boasts an impressive feature set that allows institutions to create a rich, accessible user experience for faculty, students, and staff, including:

• Unified customization interface for adding content and selecting skins and layouts
• Optional mobile-specific skins dynamically give the portal a familiar mobile-friendly user interface on mobile devices
• Drag and drop layout reordering
• Updated skins
• Aggregation, compression, and caching of 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

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Secure Environments for your Faculty, Staff, and Students

Portal Administration
Updates to portal administration in uPortal 4 make it simpler than ever to create, assign, and manage groups, permissions, and content.
Portal administration features include:

• Delegated permissions for user group and content management
• Portlet publishing workflow
• Dashboards for managing users, groups, permissions, and content
  

Authentication, Security, and Privacy
uPortal ships with Jasig's Central Authentication Service (CAS) enabled for authentication out of the box. It includes APIs and a configuration mechanism for validating user credentials against multiple backing credential stores, including databases and LDAP. uPortal may also be integrated with other SSO frameworks, such as Pub-Cookie and Internet2's Shibboleth.

uPortal's Person Directory API merges user attribute information from multiple sources, including LDAP, Active Directory, and custom databases. User attributes drive content distribution and authorization decisions.

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's Groups API allows the portal to consume group information from multiple sources, including LDAP, Active Directory, Grouper, and custom databases. uPortal's new Groups Management Portlet provides an attractive dashboard for managing and creating groups, and supports delegated administration.

The permissions framework represents administrative privileges, content access, and provides an extensible solution for handling custom authorization tasks. The Permissions API works alongside uPortal's groups' framework and is capable of handling permissions inheritance.

More Features
Additional features, such as mobile access and statistics and auditing, are also available with uPortal.

To view the complete feature set and gallery, please visit: http://www.jasig.org/uportal

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Extending the Portal

Portlet Development and Deployment
Successful enterprise portals deliver compelling integrations with campus services, combining diverse IT resources to create a unified, personalized user experience. uPortal delivers content through reusable portlet publishing types and resource-specific portlets.

Pre-Configured Portlet Types
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
  

Optional Portlets
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
• Facebook
• Google Maps
• LTI Integration
• Search
• Translation
• Twitter
• 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:

• Free access to all maintenance releases and bug fixes
• Free access to all security notifications
• Free portal administration manual
• Free access to portal and portlet user and development email lists
• Free access to community calls, demonstrations, and roadmap presentations
• Paid support, custom development, and training available from Jasig commercial partners
  

Learn More
Please visit http://www.jasig.org/uportal for more information.

Jasig Logo

Jasig, a non-profit membership organization, is a consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates sponsoring open source software projects for higher education.

Jasig is responsible for the uPortal community open source enterprise portal and goes out of their way to foster collaboration within and among communities of practice.

Find out more about the Jasig community: http://www.jasig.org/uportal

uPortal 4.0 is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Full details on Jasig licensing are available at: http://www.jasig.org/licensing/

© Copyright 2011, Jasig. Some rights reserved.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us

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