Newsletter - 200712 - December 2007

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1 Welcome
1.1 Editor's Message

2 JA-SIG Project Updates
2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.2 uPortal

3 Community News and Events
3.1 JA-SIG Spring Conference 2008 (April 28-30, 2008)
3.2 JA-SIG Related Sakai Conference Presentation
3.3 New uPortal Board Liaison

4 Other Events and Activities
4.1 EclipseCon 2008 (March 17-20, 2008)
4.2 2008 JavaOne Conference (May 6-9, 2008)
4.3 portal 2008 - measurement & assessment (June 3-6, 2008)
4.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 (October 28-31, 2008)

5 Job Postings
5.1 Portal Job Openings at Yale University
5.2 Kuali Foundation Executive Director

6 From the Blogosphere
6.1 What Makes uPortal Unique?

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

In addition to the usual project updates, this month's content includes announcements regarding the JA-SIG Spring Conference and the uPortal Board Liaison role. You will also find herein a few interesting job postings at Yale and an exciting opportunity with the Kuali Foundation, and an insightful commentary on uPortal by our Acting Executive Director, Jonathan Markow.

Special thanks go to Andrew Petro, Jim Helwig and Jonathan Markow for helping me out with the content for this month.

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

Happy Holidays!
Mark Mark (University of Manitoba - Home of the Vanier Cup Champions!)
Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

Progress is currently being made on CAS 3.1.2, including:

minor fixes in JIRA
providing an alternative implementation of ServicesRegistryDao
providing an auditing/logging/statistics infrastructure to CAS

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

News item about release of uPortal 2.6.1 general audience release:
I am pleased to announce the availability of the "general audience" release of uPortal 2.6.1. This release is available for immediate download from the uPortal website and is tagged in SVN.

Since the GA release of uPortal 2.6.0, several issues have been addressed, including support for multiple JSR-168 portlets in the unauthenticated "guest" user experience, delivery of a functional off-line build and deploy script, a fix to the Bookmarks Portlet administrative configuration workflow, and even ALM bugfixes, though of course the consensus recommendation among uPortal developers is that uPortal deloyers continue to migrate to DLM in preference to continued use of ALM.

Many people contributed code, testing, feedback, and issues leading up to the uPortal 2.6.1 release, including Nick Bolton, Timothy Carroll, Eric Dalquist, Andy Gherna, Cris Holdorph, Brad Johnson and Andrew Wills, to name a few. These people and others deserve credit for their parts in making uPortal possible.

Speaking of migrations, to DLM and otherwise, Unicon's Drew Wills has been continuing exciting work of late (including work undertaken on behalf of Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and others) to improve open source tooling for import, export, and migration of uPortal data, which is expected to ease the migration path to the upcoming uPortal 3 release.

Contributed by:
Andrew Petro, uPortal 2.6.1 release engineer

------------- Hold the Dates! ---------------

Monday, April 28th to Wednesday, April 30th
(Pre-Conference Seminars on Sunday, April 27th)
Crowne Plaza St. Paul Riverfront Hotel
St. Paul, Minnesota

JA-SIG presents:
HIGHER EDUCATION SOLUTIONS: THE COMMUNITY SOURCE WAY

The program is being planned jointly by representatives from DSpace, Fedora, Fluid, Internet2, Kuali, JA-SIG, and Sakai.

The aim is to expose our respective communities to the wide array of community source efforts in our field, to share technologies across project boundaries, and to approach common issues and problems together in the areas of planning, strategy, software development, adoption, and sustainability.

Target audience: Developers, designers, content providers, administrators, faculty, planners, strategists, decision makers...

There will be something for everyone!

Watch for registration information and Call for Proposals in January.

At this month's Sakai conference in Newport Beach, California, Dan McCallum and Andrew Petro, both of Unicon, Inc., presented on their having investigated potential for re-use of and integration with JA-SIG software in the Sakai collaboration and learning environment. Andrew emphasizes that Dan deserves credit for the technical heavy lifting involved. The investigated integration, available via Sakai "contrib" shared source control, explores programmatic integration with JA-SIG CAS and JA-SIG PersonDirectory services. This is a level of integration beyond that normally afforded in Sakai's support for e.g. use of CAS single sign on.

The presentation was well-received and included mention of additional opportunities for using other JA-SIG software in Sakai, including the Groups and Permissions framework that plays an important role in many production uPortal instances today and has been refactored, primarily through the efforts of Columbia's Dan Ellentuck, to be available as a standalone library adoptable in projects beyond uPortal.

After a long stint of service and a terrific job, Bill Thompson is stepping down as uPortal Board Liaison. I'm happy to let you know that Jim Helwig has agreed to take over the responsibilities, effective January 1st. Jim will replace Bill on the uPortal Project Steering Committee (PSC) in this new capacity.

I'd like to thank Bill for his trusty stewardship and the work that he has done to make Rutgers a leading institution during an impressive growth phase for uPortal. Don't worry, we're not letting him wander too far and we know where he lives.

Jim has made UW-Madison a key uPortal school in recent years and has been a very strong supporter of the project. We appreciate his continued commitment and we're looking forward to his contributions to the uPortal PSC.

Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Acting Executive Director

Place: Santa Clara, California

"EclipseCon is the premier technical and user conference focusing on the power of the Eclipse platform. From implementers to users, and everyone in between, if you are using, building, or considering Eclipse, EclipseCon is the conference you need to attend."

Source: EclipseCon 2008 Web Site - http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/

Place: The Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA

"Attracting over 15,000 developers and leaders in the developer community - from industry leaders, to experienced developers to developers starting out - this conference is one that brings together some of the industry's best and brightest.

The JavaOne conference is your opportunity to reach this specialized community by educating and sharing your experience and expertise with the developer community."

Source: 2008 JavaOne Conference Web Site - http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/index.jsp

Place: Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

"portal2008: measurement & assessment is June 3-6, 2008 at Gettysburg College. The theme is about determining how to gauge the effectiveness of a portal as well as how to determine the success of a portal project."

For more information, see https://biz.gettysburg.edu/it/portal08/index.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

With Yale's plans to build on their implementation of the University Portal project, two new positions within the Information Technology Services (ITS) organization have been created.

Technical Manager of Infrastructure Services
Reporting to the Director of Web Services, this hands-on position that manages a team of IT professionals with responsibility for strategic delivery of Web infrastructure services, and provides project management for a variety of complex Web infrastructure services projects of medium and large size and complexity that are central to the long-term success of Yale. Expected projects include the University Portal project.

Job details: https://sjobs.brassring.com/1033/asp/tg/cim_jobdetail.asp?jobId=188174

Web Systems Analyst
Reporting to the Technical Manager of Infrastructure Services unit within the Web Services department, participants in the strategic implementation and technical support of the University Portal and its related strategic technologies.

Job details: https://sjobs.brassring.com/1033/asp/tg/cim_jobdetail.asp?jobId=188171

Submitted by:
Roger V. Despres
Director of Web Services
Information Technology Services, Yale University
web: http://www.yale.edu/its/web/

The Kuali Foundation is hiring an Executive Director. The job posting may be found at http://kuali.org/news/ExecJobDescription.shtml

You may have seen a few posts on the uPortal lists, courtesy of Jim Helwig, Carl Jacobson, and Jonathan Markow, in response to the question, "What do you think is unique or special about portal requirements in the higher-ed space?". Acting Executive Director, Jonathan Markow, has fine-tuned his thoughts on the matter and posted them to his blog (with special thanks to Jim Helwig).

http://blogs.ja-sig.org/jjmarkow

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JA-SIG Newsletter - December 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 January 15th, 2008. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Monday, January 14th, 2008.

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Newsletter - 200712 - December 2007

JA-SIG Newsletter - December 2007

1 Welcome

1.1 Editor's Message

2 Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.2 uPortal

3 Community News and Events

3.1 JA-SIG Spring Conference 2008

3.2 JA-SIG-Related Sakai Conference Presentation

3.3 New uPortal Board Liaison

4 Other Events and Activities

4.1 EclipseCon 2008 (March 17-20, 2008)

4.2 2008 JavaOne Conference (May 6-9, 2008)

4.3 portal 2008 - measurement & assessment (June 3-6, 2008)

4.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 (October 28-31, 2008)

5 Job Postings

5.1 Portal Job Openings at Yale University

5.2 Kuali Foundation Executive Director

6 From the Blogosphere

6.1 "What Makes uPortal Unique?"