Newsletter - 200808 - August 2008

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1.1 Six Weeks Until the Unconference
1.2 Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting (October 13-16, 2008)
1.3 EDUCAUSE 2008 - Orlando, Florida (October 28-31, 2008)

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 Recent CAS Deployers
2.1.2 Governance Model Goes Before Board of Directors
2.1.3 Steering Committee Nominations
2.1.4 CAS Roadmap and Planning
2.1.5 CAS 3.3 Final
2.1.6 phpCAS Client 1.0 Final
2.1.7 Call for Development Team
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 uPortal Update

3.1 The Wiki Dashboard
3.2 Recommended Reading (from and for the JA-SIG community)

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Registration is open for the JA-SIG Fall 2008 Unconference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and people are signing up!

You can register online at https://www.concentra-cms.com/register/start.action?confId=34. Also sign up on the conference wiki at http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/DRTP.

Check out what others want to discuss and add your own items of interest. Here are just some of the topics people have said they would like to talk about:

CAS and uPortal roadmap planning: Where do we go from here?
Production experiences
Fluid component integration
Using Spring Web Flow 2 for Administrative UIs
Portal and portlet health monitoring and life-cycle management
Infrastructure: High availability, ESB, SOA
uPortal 3 implementation workshop: We'll be discussing best practices, performance, operational issues, load testing, etc.. We'll share stories, experiences, solutions.
Web analytics
Continuous integration

It's your unconference! We plan the final agenda onsite!

The unconference itself is October 6-8 while October 9-10 is set aside as a time for developers to work on implementing ideas inspired from discussions had at the unconference. It is also an opportunity to work along side other developers in the JA-SIG community. Anyone can stay for these two days at no additional cost. If you have an idea that you would like to collaborate on during these two work days, please feel free to list it at http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/LB7P.

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Fun Stuff at the Madison Unconference:

Not all of the professional interaction at an Unconference needs to take place in the meeting rooms. We're hoping for good weather and the opportunity for a few outings:

For the runners among us, Jim Helwig has posted a list of very attractive looking routes.
For the cyclists, Allison Bloodworth has suggested a bicycle tour.
And we'll certainly have the usual fascinating dining opportunities for casual dinner groups.

Have a look at the activities list and contribute your ideas for get-togethers.

See you in person, in October!

Dates: October 13-16, 2008
Place: New Orleans, Louisiana (Sheraton New Orleans Hotel)

"The Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting provides the community an opportunity to share the latest information on timely issues and rapidly evolving areas of interest. The fall program will offer sessions that highlight innovative uses of advanced networking for research and teaching, as well as technical sessions on the development and evolution of high-performance network infrastructures in support of local to global cyberinfrastructure. Sessions will focus on initiatives and projects that explore ways in which advanced network applications, services, tools, and digital content empower and enhance the capability of research and education communities. In addition, the program will focus on the challenges of Business Continuity Planning and the progress of Health Science and Teaching and Learning/K20 initiatives. Case studies of how advanced networking has succeeded in enabling research and education, why, and what others can learn from this success are also encouraged."

Source: http://events.internet2.edu/2008/fall-mm/calls.cfm

"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

We'd like to welcome the latest CAS deployers to the CAS community!

You can see the complete list here: http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/community/deployers/index.html

If you're not on the list and would like to be, contact ScottS

The CAS community has been hard at work defining and refining their version of a steering committee. The steering committee is modeled after the uPortal Steering Committee (with some minor twists!). The governance model goes before the August board meeting.

In parallel with getting approval from the JA-SIG Board for the JA-SIG CAS Steering Committee, we've put out a request for nominations (including self-nominations) for the JASIG CAS Steering Committee. Submit your bio, vision, goals, experience, etc. to Scott Battaglia. The JA-SIG membership will vote on the nominees to be included in the JA-SIG CAS Steering Committee. The goal is to have this in place before the October UnConference

While the steering committee gets underway, a group of CAS developers, deployers, and other interested parties have started to have talks about the future of CAS. These conversations are open to everyone and the meeting notes are freely available. The last meeting notes are available here:
http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CAS/2008-08-15+Conference+Call

This group of people will be holding another conference call sometime around the second week of September. If you're interested in joining, please contact ScottS or Benn Oshrin

We encourage you to contribute however you can to this process, whether its on-list, on the phone, or via the wiki!

We're pleased to announce the final release of CAS Server 3.3. CAS Server 3.3 includes numerous bug fixes, enhancements, and new features including:

Bug Fixes

LDAP - support "/" in DNs
Move all files that require Spring LDAP to the LDAP module
Data too long for column in Services Management tool
Properly escaping all example JSP pages
Language fixes for German
Properly populate meta data on re-authentication

Enhancements

Descriptions of all Spring configuration files
Google Accounts Support upgrade to support latest Google Apps
Requires Maven 2.0.9 to build
Library upgrades including PersonDirectory 1.1.2, JBossCache 2, Spring Security 2.0 and Inspektr 0.7.0
Transforming Principal names with SPNEGO
Added Logging to JpaTicketRegistry
Service Management Tool can ignore custom principals

New Features

RESTful API
Memcached-backed Ticket Registry
Terracotta Support
Trusted LDAP module for trusted network clients
Slovenian language support
Support for Services Management via LDAP

Thanks to everyone who reported bugs and helped test!

You can download the entire release from our web site: http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/downloads/

Some information on upgrading from CAS 3.2 to 3.3 can be found here:
http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASUM/Upgrading

The 1.0 release of the phpCAS client is now out with some new features including single sign out and being able to be PEAR-installable. Congrats to Pascal Aubry, Julien Marchal and Brett Bieber on the release! You can find out more info here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASC/phpCAS

While work continues on the 3.3 branch and discussions are still ongoing about the future CAS releases, we're pretty sure there will be one! Thus we're starting to gather developers, translators, UI experts, business analysts, etc. to start putting together design guidelines, rules, and documentation. Check out: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CAS/CAS4+Development If you're interested please contact ScottS

Matt Peterson announced that uPortal 3 is now in production at the University of New England at Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. He reports that, "We successfully released uPortal 3.0.1 into production this morning at UNE, replacing uPortal 2.5.3. So far, so good! Our log files are far, far, far cleaner due to the improved code base of uP3. It is also snappier and more reliable. Thanks for everyone's input into issues we encountered on the way to this point." You can keep up to date on other uPortal 3 implementation efforts at http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/vQXP.

The uPortal Steering Committee is working with Erik Olsson of UC Irvine on making their Announcements Portlet an official JA-SIG sandbox project. Currently it is available at http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/PLT/Announcements+Portlet. As more portlets become available through JA-SIG, we would like to bundle them with uPortal.

This month the uPortal steering committee responded to a request for fact-checking by CMS Watch of a draft of the uPortal chapter of their proprietary Enterprise Portals report. Thanks are due to Colin Clark, Jonathan Markow, and Andrew Petro for collaboration on that response. The Enterprise Portals Report is available from CMS Watch for a fee. The committee is presently working to refactor its responses to the CMS Watch draft into improvements to the uPortal documentation, primarily in the uPortal manual, alongside other documentation improvements. The uPortal documentation is free and publicly available.

uPortal 3.1.0-M1 was released on August 6th. This is a Milestone build and should be considered a developer preview. It includes new features such as database backed event logging, identity and attribute swapper administrative portlets, significant performance improvements along with over 70 other bug fixes and enhancements. 3.1.0-M1 can be downloaded from the all releases page and release notes are available in the wiki.

Contributed by: The uPortal Steering Committee

One of the best ways to keep up with the current activity in the JA-SIG community is to watch the "Dashboard". We are referring here to the front-facing page on the JA-SIG wiki, found at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/dashboard.action . You will find not only in-depth information on all of the JA-SIG projects, but also a listing (on the right-hand side of the page) of the most recently updated wiki pages.

Be sure to visit often for all the latest and greatest things happening in JA-SIG.

"These are books of interest that members of the JA-SIG community recommend you consider reading." (With thanks to Jim Helwig for compiling it for the wiki.) Feel free to add your own reading recommendations to the list!

http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Recommend+Reading

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JA-SIG Newsletter - August 2008

Archives available in the JA-SIG wiki at:
http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Newsletter

If your institution or company has items of interest to the JA-SIG membership, please submit them via email to newsletter at ja-sig dot org.

The next JA-SIG Newsletter will be published on or about September 15th, 2008. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Sunday, September 14th, 2008. Thanks!

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Newsletter - 200808 - August 2008

JA-SIG Newsletter - August 2008

1 Upcoming Events

2 JA-SIG Project Updates

3 Around JA-SIG

Upcoming Events

1.1 Six Weeks Until the Unconference

1.2 Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting (October 13-16, 2008)

1.3 EDUCAUSE 2008 - Orlando, Florida (October 28-31, 2008)

2 JA-SIG Project Updates

2.1 CAS

2.1.1 Recent CAS Deployers

2.1.2 Governance Model Goes Before Board of Directors

2.1.3 Steering Committee Nominations

2.1.4 CAS Roadmap and Planning

2.1.5 CAS 3.3 Final

2.1.6 phpCAS Client 1.0 Final

2.1.7 Call for Development Team

2.2 uPortal

uPortal Update

3 Around JA-SIG

3.1 The Wiki Dashboard

3.2 Recommended Reading (from and for the JA-SIG community)