07summer Intro to uPortal for Implementors

This is a pre-conference seminar scheduled for the conference. Sunday, June 24, 8:30AM - 12:00PM.

Proposed Title

Introduction to uPortal for Implementors

Description

A hands-on single-slot (3.5 hour) seminar on building, deploying, configuring, and customizing uPortal, with attention to such topics as installing channels and portlets, configuring groups, installing and configuring security, understanding and using permissions, etc. Layout management and skin customization with be deliberately de-emphasized in this seminar not because they are unimportant but because they are expected to be better covered in other seminars. While non-technical attendees are welcome, getting the most from this seminar will require some prior familiarity with Java Servlet web applications and the Ant build tool. This seminar is intended as a launching point for developers in becoming familiar with uPortal, with activities continuing in the context of the uPortal opensource project post-seminar.

Target audience

Technical staff (application and systems programmers, systems administrators) looking to build, deploy, and customize uPortal. This seminar was almost titled "Adopting uPortal", but that name might have been ambiguous in suggesting that this is a treatment of the political and project management aspects of a campus uPortal deployment. Those are not the aspects of uPortal discussed in this seminar. Rather, this seminar is the hands-on, step by step, bringing up a uPortal instance.

While non-technical staff are welcome to attend this seminar and may be able to follow along,

Hands on?

Seminar participants are encouraged to bring a laptop computer with a CD-ROM drive and capable of booting from that drive. Tentatively, the planned environment is an in-memory Ubuntu environment customized to include a working Java / Ant/ Tomcat / uPortal environment but the presenter reserves the right to punt on this and instead ask participants to provide a working environment into which Java / Ant / Tomcat are either already installed or are installed from a provided CD-ROM at the beginning of the seminar. More information about setting up an environment to hit the ground running for this seminar will be available closer to the conference.

Duration

This is a single-slot (3.5 hour?) seminar.

Proposed Presenter

Andrew Petro will be coordinating this seminar and presenting it at least in part, but he may recruit / draft others to assist.