Newsletter - 200710 - October 2007

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Last updated: Dec 19, 2007Version comment
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JA-SIG Newsletter - October 2007
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1 Welcome

1.1 Editor's Message
1.2 Infrastructure and Services Team Update

2 Call for Volunteers

2.1 JA-SIG Spring 2008 Conference Committee

3 Project Updates

3.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
3.2 uPortal

4 Community News and Events

4.1 JA-SIG Winter 2007 Unconference (November 12-13, 2007)
4.1.1 Register Now!
4.1.1 Lightning Talks
4.2 8th Sakai Conference (December 4-7, 2007)

5 Education and Training

5.1 The Education of a JA-SIG Newsletter Editor

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1 Welcome

1.1 Editor's Message

Welcome to the October 2007 issue of the JA-SIG Newsletter.

This month's newsletter includes, among other things, some project updates (of course) and a few items on the upcoming JA-SIG Unconference in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Be sure to read the "Register Now!" piece. This is one event you won't want to miss!

As always, feel free to send your comments or content to newsletter at jasig dot org.

Enjoy!
Mark Mark (University of Manitoba), Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

1.2 Infrastructure and Services Team Update

Please join us in welcoming Bob Lewis (Texas A&M - r.lewis@tamu.edu) and Patrick Berry (CSU Chico - PBerry@csuchico.edu) to the
Infrastructure and Services team. Bob has volunteered to take on the "Clearinghouse Coordinator" position and will be monitoring the mailing lists for any new portlets, channels, or other valuable technology solutions worth listing in our current Clearinghouse wiki page. Patrick will be administrating JA-SIG's instance of JIRA and looking to keep us up-to-date on upgrades.

The team will be discussing the future of the Clearinghouse and other related ideas surrounding more of a "projects based" solution, at the upcoming Unconference next month. Anyone that is interested, is welcomed to join in this discussion.

The team is also making progress on transitioning our current web based services to the new server that was granted to us by Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

2 Call for Volunteers

2.1 JA-SIG Spring 2008 Conference Committee

It's time to start planning for the upcoming "traditional" JA-SIG conference, not to be confused with the "Winter Unconference" that's being held next month. Given the recent change in direction, moving from a twice-a-year traditional conference, to a once-a-year "Unconference" and a once-a-year "traditional" conference, the board looked to find a time when there would be few if any conflicts with other events in Higher-Ed. After researching alternate times, we have identified Sunday to Wednesday, April 27th-30th as the best possible dates.

In the spirit of collaboration, the board is currently talking with other higher education community source foundations and projects about developing a joint program with them. We are also interested in adding fresh new content, in addition to the already excellent topics around uPortal, CAS, and HyperContent - which attendees have come to enjoy and benefit from.

We are currently looking to assemble a committee for planning this conference. If you are interested in being a member of this team, please contact me via email at agodert@cornell.edu. This is a great opportunity to connect up with your JA-SIG colleagues and people from other community source efforts and to shape the next generation of traditional JA-SIG conferences.

Sincerely,
Aaron Godert
JA-SIG 2008 Conference Committee, Board Liaison

3 Project Updates

3.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

CAS Server 3.1.1
The CAS team is currently working on the CAS 3.1.1 release, expected to be released this week. Its currently in Release Candidate status.

CAS Client for Java
The CAS team is currently working on an update to the CAS Client for Java to include support for some of the new features of the CAS Server 3.1 release.

JA-SIG UnConference
Members of the CAS team will be available during the JA-SIG UnConference. The team encourages interested deployers to come to the UnConference to collaborate, share tips, and road map future versions of the CAS server and clients.

Contributed by:
ScottS (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, JA-SIG Central Authentication Service

3.2 uPortal

The Fall 2007 Fluid Summit was well attended, Eric Dalquist and Gary Thompson were there in person and SusanBramhall and Jen Bourey participated through video conference. The summit was productive and resulted in the start of work on integrating the Fluid reorderer component into uPortal as the client side for the Drag & Drop layout management framework contributed by Yale for uPortal 2.6. The goal is to have the reorderer integrated for the uPortal 3.0 release this winter.

Since the previous newsletter, uPortal has released a second release candidate of uPortal 2.6.1, correcting issues in offline deployment of JSR-168 portlets in the otherwise improved portlet deployment tool in uPortal 2.6.0, as well as correcting several other small bugs.

Increasingly, uPortal developers are discussing and collaborating in an IRC chat room hosted by freenode. Connection information and logs are available in the wiki.

IRC Channels: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/IRC+Channels

Contributed by:
Eric Dalquist (University of Wisconsin - Madison), uPortal Release Engineer

4 Community News and Events

4.1 JA-SIG Winter 2007 Unconference (November 12-13, 2007)

4.1.1 Register Now!

If you're planning to attend our first JA-SIG Unconference (Nov 12-13 at Rutgers University), register NOW. The costs are very low and the content/learning value is very high!

Here is a handy 7-point checklist for prospective Unconference attendees:

  1. Take a look at what's being planned on the Unconference wiki space: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/MQRl
  2. Decide you really don't want to miss any of this!
  3. Register for the Unconference right here: https://www.concentra-cms.com/register/start.action?confId=28
  4. Visit and add your name on the Unconference Planning Site on the JA-SIG wiki. This is a great place to indicate your interests — what you'd like to discuss, learn, share or teach. It is also a good place to note your travel arrangements. This can assist in coordinating with others.
  5. Call the Rutgers University Inn and Conference Center at 732-932-9144 to reserve a room for your stay. Hurry! Rooms are limited, and the conference rate will only be held until October 25th. Make sure you ask for the "JA-SIG Unconference" room block and rate!
  6. Take a look at hotel, travel directions, and other information at http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/SoF7
  7. If you are unable to book a room at the University Inn and Conference Center, consult these lists of other nearby hotels: http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/leadconf/hotels.pdf , http://www.travelforecaster.com/hotelinfo/east_brunswick/nj/usa/92151/#trafficID=500026519&refererPageID=10 . You may want to check the participants page to see where others are staying.

See you at the Unconference,
The Winter 2007 JA-SIG Unconference Committee

4.1.2 Lightning Talks

The upcoming JA-SIG UnConference will include time for lightning talks. A lightning talk is a short (~10 minutes, shorter is totally okay, think fast like greased lightning) presentation. Conference participants are strongly encouraged to prepare their own lightning talk and to share ideas for lightning talks they would like to hear (with a whole wiki page devoted to this).

Talks already likely to flash and boom in New Brunswick include remarks on greatness by Board director and uPortal project liaison Bill Thompson, exposition of advanced guest layout techniques by new Board director Susan Bramhall, and elucidation of Maven2 by uPortal Steering Committee member Eric Dalquist. Other topics in the mix include user attributes in CAS 3.1, SpringPortletMVC, Fluid, administrative switch user functionality...

Please jump in and suggest lightning talk topics for which the applause will be thunderous.

Contributed by: Andrew Petro (Unicon, Inc.)

4.2 8th Sakai Conference (December 4-7, 2007)

"The Sakai Foundation is pleased to announce that the December 2007 Sakai Community Conference will be held in Newport Beach, California, USA. The dates will be Tuesday-Thursday, December 4-7, with pre- and post-conference sessions and activities on Monday the 3rd, and Friday, the 7th. The site will be the Newport Beach Marriott for the Tuesday-Thursday meetings." (from the sakaiproject.org web site)

For further information, go to https://sakai.educonference.com/conference/index.php

5 Education and Training

5.1 The Education of a JA-SIG Newsletter Editor

I have a few colleagues who regularly send me hyperlinks they think might interest me. And I'm glad they do because they invariably are of great interest. Oh sure, some of them are provided in response to my sometimes too earnest advocacy of a particular point of view or position, but that is welcome too. Along that vein, then, here are some of the things that have been interesting me of late.

What's New in Eclipse Europa (ed. my favourite tool) http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2007/pdf/TS-9920.pdf

OpenDS 1.0 (All Java Open Source LDAP) http://www.opends.org

Spring LDAP http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2007/jw-06-springldap.html#resources

OpenPTK (Open Source User Provisioning Toolkit) http://www.openptk.org

How to Use OpenID http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7463164786703060643

The Future of OpenID http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3812012811402026027

OpenID for Java http://code.google.com/p/openid4java/

Luminis Developer Network http://www.lumdev.net/

Sakai Project http://sakaiproject.org/

Kuali Foundation http://www.kuali.org

And, of course, JA-SIG http://www.ja-sig.org

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JA-SIG Newsletter - October 2007

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@ja-sig.org.

The next JA-SIG Newsletter will be published on or about November 15th, 2007. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Wednesday, November 14th, 2007.

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