ERP Integration for uPortal UnConf08

ERP Integration
October 7th, 2008
2 - 3pm Auditorium

While vastly incomplete, some of the thoughts collected in the ERP Integration session are listed below. The general consensus of the audience though seemed to be centered around creating a collaborative environment to generate portlets and other functional pieces to integrate our portals with our ERP systems.

• Expectations
  • Denison - Interested in various ways schools have integrated with their SIS/ERP system. What are some of the common/abstract data elements to deal with for manipulating/displaying data. Proposing a shared repository of reusable objects, approaches, etc.
  • What functionality points are displayed in portals?
  • Yale - Show grades in their portal. But a bigger picture issue is to define what to show in the portal. For example, out of all the students coming onto campus, which ones need the most assistance?
• Solutions
  • Millikin has developed many modules/helper routines to centralize common business logic/reporting either within the portal or external to it.
  • Jason Shao - Perhaps we setup a wiki page to start sharing use cases, design goals,
  • Ken McCreery Institution is buying Luminus, and has uPortal. Will likely migrate everything into Luminus.
  • Jonathon - According to the Luminus portal manager, they are looking to become portal agnostic. Looking to use portals that have strong WSRP consumption, which uPortal does not.
  • Through the JA-SIG incubation project, we can collaborate on developing some common portlets, solutions, and architectures.
  • Check out the LUMDEV list, an underground list of Luminus developers and admins. They seem to freely share information, provides a forum to talk.
  • Abstract the select statements, etc into a webapp which the banner admins install and control through an admin gui. The web developers install things like the schedule portlet, etc, which talk only to the web app that the banner/erp admin controls.