06winter Zeroth Click

This was a presentation at the Winter 2006 JA-SIG conference.

Title: Zeroth Click: high value portal guest pages
Proposed Presenter: Andrew Petro

Note that the attached PowerPoint slides have comments typed in to accompany each slide.

Synopsis

The value of uPortal is often articulated in terms of aggregation of user attributes, group information, and user preferences, driving a customized user experience via sophisticated layout technology and mediated by a permissions engine. Guest pages are often little more than an exhortation to log in and enter the richer authenticated user experience. This presentation will challenge that viewpoint on uPortal, examining the potential for leveraging uPortal to provide rich, customized user experiences from the "zeroth click", the very first portal HTTP response. Examples will be speciifc to the technologies of JA-SIG projects uPortal and CAS, but the ideas are applicable for other portals and authentication mechanisms.

Outline

• uPortal guest page tour
  • Static pages
  • Dynamic guest views
• Guest users and pages
  • How uPortal handles the unauthenticated user experience
• Educated guesses - customizing before login
  • Special URLs for accessing the portal
  • Considering the remote address
  • Cookies
• Bootstrapping a login: CAS
  • "gateway" CAS feature
  • transparent authentication mechanisms