Newsletter - 200810 - October 2008

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Last updated: Oct 24, 2008Version comment

JA-SIG Newsletter - October 2008

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1 Upcoming Events

1.1 Announcing the 2009 JASIG Spring Conference - Dallas, Texas (March 1-4, 2009)
1.2 EDUCAUSE 2008 - Orlando, Florida (October 28-31, 2008)
1.3 EclipseCon 2009 - Santa Clara, California (March 23-26, 2009)

2 JA-SIG Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 Announcing the JASIG CAS Steering Committee Members
2.1.2 CAS 4 Roadmap Finalized
2.1.3 CAS Server Updates
2.1.4 OpenRegistry Pre-Incubation Project
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 Initiatives from the Unconference
2.2.2 uPortal 3 Upgrades

3 Around JA-SIG

3.1 Call for Proposals: JA-SIG Spring Conference "Higher Education Open Source Communities - Working Together"
3.2 Unicon's Education IT Consulting Group Collaborates with Johns Hopkins University Staff for uPortal 3 Upgrade
3.3 Leading Integration of Enterprise Learning and Administrative Systems: The Next Generation
3.4 JA-SIG at Educause 2008
3.5 The JA-SIG Wiki Dashboard

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1 Upcoming Events

1.1 Announcing the 2009 JASIG Spring Conference - Dallas, Texas (March 1-4, 2009)

Save the Dates!

Announcing the 2009 JASIG Spring Conference
Sunday, March 1 - Wednesday, March 4
Join JASIG and the greater higher education open source community!

Dallas, Texas
The Sheraton Dallas Hotel http://tinyurl.com/6ch662

Watch for more information soon! http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/09spring/index.html

See you in Dallas this coming March,
The 2009 JASIG Spring Conference Committee

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

"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

1.3 EclipseCon 2009 - Santa Clara, California (March 23-26, 2009)

"The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce EclipseCon 2009, March 23rd - 26th, 2009, in Santa Clara, California. The entire Eclipse community is invited to participate."

Source: http://www.eclipsecon.org/2009/
Official Blog: http://eclipsecon.blogspot.com/

2 JA-SIG Project Updates

2.1 CAS

2.1.1 Announcing the JASIG CAS Steering Committee Members

The JASIG CAS Steering Committee has been elected. We're pleased to announce the following members of the JASIG CAS Steering Committee:

  • Scott Battaglia - Rutgers University - Developer Representative
  • David Whitehurst - Cape Henry Technologies, Inc.
  • Eric Pierce - University of South Florida
  • Troy Bull - Iowa Foundation for Medical Care
  • Benn Oshrin - Rutgers University - JASIG Board Liaison
  • Jonathan Markow - JASIG - ex officio

The steering committee is charged with gathering requirements from the community, guiding the roadmaps, allocating any available resources, promoting CAS, and many other things (wink)

2.1.2 CAS 4 Roadmap Finalized

At the JASIG UnConference the CAS4 Roadmap was discussed and we should be publishing it shortly. Unfortunately, due to travel and other projects, we don't have the finalized version up yet. Stay tuned!

2.1.3 CAS Server Updates

The CAS Server 3.3.1 release continues to be under development with a few more open issues.

2.1.4 OpenRegistry Pre-Incubation Project

Not CAS related specifically, but the Rutgers-led OpenRegistry project has provisionally gained pre-incubation status within the JASIG community. OpenRegistry was granted provisional pre-incubation status to allow for wiki space and mailing lists for interested members to discuss the areas of IdM registries, community needs, possible development opportunities, and possible alternatives. Pre-Incubation does not mean endorsement by the JASIG board, merely, that they feel that this is an area worth discussing.

More information can be found here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/OR/Home

2.2 uPortal

2.2.1 Initiatives from the Unconference

There were a number of lively uPortal-related discussions at the Fall JASIG Unconference. Various participants discussed plans for bundling portlets with the uPortal distributions, implementing an active document caching tool for use by the portal, ERP integration and redesigning some of the administrative tools using techniques and libraries from the Fluid project.

2.2.2 uPortal 3 Upgrades

The University of Wisconsin-Madison became the latest institution to upgrade to uPortal 3. Tuesday morning they seamlessly switched to upgraded servers without a service outage. Within 24 hours 22,000 people logged in and page response rates averaged less than 1 second.

Institutions planning on upgrading or deploying uPortal 3 within the next few months include Yale University, Southern Utah University, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and University of California, Merced. Those considering or actively working on uPortal 3 implementations are encouraged to log their progress at http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/vQXP.

3 Around JA-SIG

3.1 Call for Proposals: JA-SIG Spring Conference "Higher Education Open Source Communities - Working Together"

"Higher Education Open Source Communities - Working Together"
March 1-4, 2009
Dallas, Texas, USA

Call for Proposals now open
Deadline for submission of proposals for half or full day seminars: November 5, 2008
Deadline for submission of proposals for regular one hour sessions: December 1, 2008

Conference site: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/09spring/index.html

Dear Colleague:

The JA-SIG Conference Planning Committee is pleased to announce the Spring 2009 Conference to be held March 1-4 in Dallas, Texas.

Following the great success of last year's conference, we are partnering with our open source community colleagues to create a forum for collaboration and learning. Join your colleagues from Bedework, CAS, DSpace, Fedora, Fluid, Internet2, Kuali, Sakai, uPortal and other open source projects, and submit proposals for a pre-conference seminar, presentation, kiosk, BOF or poster session!

We welcome your contributions in the following areas:

  • Community Source Management/Governance
    What are best practices for managing community source projects or their deployments on campus? For encouraging adoption? For gaining acceptance and campus buy-in? For engaging your community in the processes? Presentations for managers, team leaders, executives, planners and strategists.
  • Design and Development
    For developers, architects, UX designers, testers. Presentations for people who build community source products, use them as a development framework or want to learn more about doing so. These are technical topics, tips and techniques, how-to's.
  • Deployment and Integration
    Presentations for people who need to make applications work on campus: developers, content providers, team leaders, evangelists. In particular, we would like to highlight work that integrates community source projects within the enterprise infrastructure and with each other.
  • Multiple Audiences
    Presentations that span multiple projects or audience types. Community source project introductions and overviews.
    Half-day Supplementary Seminars will be held in the morning and afternoon on Sunday, March 1st as well as on Wednesday (March 4th) afternoon.

Proposals may be entered on the JA-SIG Conference Website. Proposals require a Title, an Abstract (under 500 words), a Presenter Profile, and some basic affiliation information. This year we are also asking proposal submitters to select tags that best describe their proposals from a list of recommended tags.

Submit your proposal directly at http://www.ja-sig.org/jasigconf/call-form.jsp?conf_id=jasig15 or from the conference home page, where you can find all the details: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/09spring/index.html (Click the "Call for Proposals" link on the left).

We look forward to seeing you at "Higher Education Open Source Communities - Working Together"!

3.2 Unicon's Education IT Consulting Group Collaborates with Johns Hopkins University Staff for uPortal 3 Upgrade

Johns Hopkins Donates Custom Feature Enhancements to JASIG Community

Phoenix, AZ - October 15, 2008 —Unicon, Inc., the leading provider of open source enterprise portals, applications, and top end technology consulting for higher education, today announced the completion of a collaborative project with the IT staff at Johns Hopkins University for their upgrade to the latest uPortal 3 open source enterprise portal. As part of the upgrade process, Johns Hopkins University also contracted with Unicon to develop numerous uPortal 3 feature enhancements. Johns Hopkins went live with the uPortal 3 upgrade in August 2008 and contributed the newly developed enhancements back to the open source community.

"Johns Hopkins University once again demonstrates its leadership in information technology through its effective deployment of the uPortal 3 open source enterprise portal," said John C. Blakley, CEO of Unicon, Inc. "In addition to helping specify and develop key feature and performance enhancements for uPortal 3, Johns Hopkins has contributed the work done at their university to the open source community for the benefit of educational institutions and organizations worldwide."

Johns Hopkins contributed the following uPortal 3 enhancements to the open source community.

  • Usability Evaluation & Design
  • Theme and Skin Implementation
  • Fragment Administration Portlet
  • Theme/Skin Implementations: Namespacing and JavaScript Menus with jQuery

About Unicon

Unicon, Inc. specializes in providing IT and software consulting services including software engineering, systems integration, and the delivery of technology solutions and support. The company effectively utilizes open-source frameworks, applications and software to provide enterprise-level portal, collaboration, learning, messaging and secure authentication solutions for higher education institutions worldwide. Unicon is a Sakai Commercial Affiliate for the community source Collaboration and Learning Environment and also a commercial affiliate of the uPortal open source Web portal initiative. Unicon strives to base its solutions on standards-based, open-source technology for increased productivity and reduced costs. For more information, visit: www.unicon.net.

Unicon is a Registered Trademark of Unicon, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.

3.3 Leading Integration of Enterprise Learning and Administrative Systems: The Next Generation

Going to Educause?

Join us for:
Leading Integration of Enterprise Learning and Administrative Systems: The Next Generation
Tuesday, October 28, 1:30 - 3:30 PM
Rosen Centre Hotel
Orlando, FL

Members of the nonprofit IMS Global Learning Consortium, including Oracle, Sakai, and Desire2Learn have been developing a new open standard called Learning Information Services (LIS) to enable real-time, seamless data exchange. This 90-minute interactive forum will provide information on LIS and why it is better than current approaches. But, more importantly, this forum will provide an open exchange of views among end-users and leading suppliers on the key challenges today and going forward in enterprise integration of learning and administrative systems. Rob Abel, CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, will facilitate the forum. A panel of experts including Oracle, SunGard, Desire2Learn, Blackboard and Georgetown will provide their views.

Institutional attendee organizations will receive a free one-year membership in a new Learning Information Services Alliance to be launched subsequent to the meeting (this is valued between $500-$1500). Outcomes from the session will be captured for use by the LIS Alliance. Membership in the LIS Alliance will allow you and your institution to interact with peers focused on enhancing the use of data exchange between student and learning systems, including implementation of the new LIS standards.

The forum is scheduled so as not to interfere with attendance at Educause, which begins officially at 4 PM on the same day.

To express your interest in attending, please visit: http://www.imsglobal.org/LISOct2008.html

Submitted by:
Linda D. Feng, Architect, Oracle Academic Enterprise Solution
Oracle Student Products Development

3.4 JA-SIG at Educause 2008

"Are you planning to attend the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Orlando this year, October 28-31? JASIG will be featured at a number of events, and we invite you to take part in any and all of them!"

For further details, visit the web site at http://www.ja-sig.org/news/educause2008.html for further details.

3.5 The JA-SIG Wiki Dashboard

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 the site often for all the latest and greatest things happening in JA-SIG.

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JA-SIG Newsletter - October 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.

A special thanks to Scott Battaglia, Jim Helwig, and Jonathan Markow for assistance and advice on this issue.

The next JA-SIG Newsletter will be published on or about November 17th, 2008. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Friday, November 14th, 2008. Thanks!

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