Newsletter - 200910 - October 2009

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1.1 Save the Dates: Jasig Spring 2010 Conference - San Diego, California (March 2010)
1.2 EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference - Denver, Colorado (November 3-6, 2009)
1.3 Kuali Days VIII Announced! - San Antonio, Texas (November 17 and 18, 2009)

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 Community Volunteer Positions
2.1.2 CAS Distributions
2.1.3 OpenRegistry Presentations
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 Unconference Momentum

3.1 News from the Bedework Project
3.1.1 Bedework and the Unconference
3.1.2 Bedework and CalConnect
3.1.3 Bedework Development
3.1.4 Bedework Skunkworks

4.1 Call for Proposals - Jasig 2010 - Ten Years of Open Source Innovation (March 8 - 10, 2010)
4.2 Job Posting at Rutgers - Identity Management Project Manager / Architect
4.3 Presentations in Unicon's booth #475 at EDUCAUSE 2009
4.4 EDUCAUSE 2009 Market Research Session
4.5 Infusion 1.1.2 Release
4.6 CampusEAI Consortium Releases myCampus SSO Powered by Jasig CAS
4.7 Webinar - Enterprise Portals as the User Interface of Services-Oriented Architecture (Unicon, Inc.)

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Join us at the Jasig Spring 2010 Conference

"Ten Years of Open Source Innovation"

Where: The Town and Country Resort, San Diego, CA
When: March 8 - 10, 2010
Supplementary Seminars March 7th and 10th
Developer Days, March 11 - 12

Help us celebrate Jasig's 10th anniversary in San Diego with outstanding speakers and special events!

Visit our website: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html

Join our Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158260541286

Hold the dates! We hope to see you this March!

The Jasig 2010 Spring Conference Committee

"We are living in challenging times, when the need for uncommon thinking is unprecedented. You have told us you look to EDUCAUSE for insight, thought leadership, and community interaction. One event delivers all this, and more: the EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference, where you will be able to tap into an expansive pool of the best thinking in higher education IT. Maximize the value of your travel dollars and join us November 3-6, 2009 in Denver, Colorado. We're offering the richest member-driven program ever, keenly focused on providing you with the kind of tangible value you can take back to campus and use all year long:

More perspectives and insight: lightning rounds built into every track.
More global viewpoints: a 100% increase in sessions featuring international speakers.
More diversity of opinion: increased numbers of sessions spotlighting multiple presenters.
More networking with a purpose: hundreds of discussion opportunities to facilitate future collaboration.
More focus on the most complex issues: cloud computing; emerging technologies; distributed, cooperative, and blended learning environments; the latest on P2P regulations; green and sustainable IT; and much more.

There has never been a greater need for interaction, sharing, and uncommon thinking to support—and advance—the common good. Be part of this important community gathering. By working together, we can identify the best approaches to coping with the current environment while laying the foundation for future success."

Web site: http://www.educause.edu/E2009

"The Kuali Foundation is pleased to announce the dates and location for the Kuali Days VIII conference. Kuali Days VIII will be held on November 17 and 18, 2009 in San Antonio, TX. In addition to the Kuali Days VIII conference event, there will be pre-conference sessions, community meetings, and other networking activities."

Source: kuali.org - http://kuali.org/kd8

The CAS Steering Committee is looking for ways to offer non-technical and technical community members additional opportunities to help out. We've identified a number of key positions, two of which can be found at the links below:

Jasig CAS Documentation Editor - http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/fIuUAQ
Jasig CAS Documentation Coordinator - http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/eouUAQ

If you're interested in either of these positions, please contact Scott Battaglia (at scott dot battaglia at gmail dot com).

CAS releases are distributed as both ZIP files and TAR GZed files, the latest of which can be found here: http://www.jasig.org/cas/download

For a more complete list of releases, visit http://www.ja-sig.org/downloads/cas/.

Downloads of Jasig-hosted CAS clients may be found at http://www.ja-sig.org/downloads/cas-clients/.

"OpenRegistry is an OpenSource Identity Management System (IDMS). It's a place for data about people affiliated with your organization."

Want to learn more about the OpenRegistry project? An archive of OpenRegistry Presentations can be found at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/IIADAQ

There was a high degree of uPortal interest and energy at the recent Unconference. Attendees had a chance to network and share ideas. Some of the initiatives that were discussed and will see further discussion include:

uPortal roadmap and strategy documentation
Possible integration with Grouper
Security statements
uPortal Practices Library of campus portal examples, screen shots, policy statements, assets, practices, etc. (JimH)
ERP integration
Content management within the portal
New avenues for community input

Look for further information on the mailing lists or in future newsletters. If you are interested in helping out with any of these, please feel free to contact the uPortal Steering Committee at uportal-steering-committee@lists.ja-sig.org.

Arlen Johnson and Gary Schwartz attended the Unconference last month at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champagne. Like virtually all of the attendees, we found the "unsessions" to be very productive and enjoyable. Additionally, we took the opportunity to discuss the newly published Jasig licensing policies (http://www.jasig.org/licensing) with respect to Bedework. We also met with some of the University of Chicago attendees to catch up on their Bedework implementation, their current calendaring requirements, and to explore upgrading to the latest Bedework release.

Bedework, in the person of Mike Douglass, attended the CalConnect Interoperability Test Event and Round Table, hosted by Apple in Cupertino, CA earlier this month. These interoperability events allow us to test Bedework with other vendors' clients and servers under a non-disclosure agreement. The primary focus of the testing was CalDAV and CalDAV scheduling, and the October event allowed us to identify a number of issues when working with various clients.

The CalConnect Round Table (member meeting) gives us a broader forum for discussion of issues we are tackling. Most of these issues are enhancements to the calendaring, or problems that surface as systems become more open.

An issue which received significant attention is event publication. We have received (and continue to receive) requests for new Bedework features which are not part of the calendaring standards, for example image support, rich text, sponsors. All of these are good things in principle, but without support for these capabilities in other calendaring products, they are not all that useful. There is renewed interest in pursuing these issues from a number of vendors.

Calendar sharing was also discussed. Bedework already supports a form of sharing in 3.5 - the subscriptions that can be created are very similar to symbolic links, and work with existing CalDAV clients. However, there is no standard way to create these, or to invite others to share a calendar. We described the various ways our systems currently implement
sharing.

Sharing resource information has become very important to all of us. CalConnect's Resources Technical Committee described progress towards an abstract schema for resources with mappings to vCard and LDAP. Resources of particular interest are rooms, buildings and specifying available equipment. Prior work on defining an iCalendar extension may allow this
information to be referenced from events, enabling capabilities such as searches for events within a given radius, or allowing mobile devices to guide people to an event. The preferred delivery method for this information is likely to be CardDAV (a feature in Bedework 3.5)

As chair of the Timezones technical committee, Mike presented the progress made since the last Round Table . We are approaching publication of some IETF RFC drafts which may lead to a solution to many of the longstanding timezone issues.

There was discussion about some of the capabilities for federation which we are working on, and which Bedework already supports, as well as extensions to CalDAV which reduce some of the load on the server by enabling push notification of calendar collection changes. We have been active (Gary is the Chair of this TC) in Freebusy discussions, and the current topic is enabling a more consensus based approach to determining meeting times, as typified by doodle.com for example. We agreed to define how such data could be transported in calendar objects allowing more general client support.

There was significant discussion on the problems surrounding mobile devices. Recently, the mobile calendaring situation has changed significantly as vendors start providing ActiveSync and/or CalDAV support. There is a growing interest in leveraging the big advantage of mobile devices - mobility and local geospatial/time context.

We have been working to leverage the caching technology and URL builder developed by Duke and Yale. Barry Leibson, one of our newest developers, is coordinating this integration effort, likely also include the University of Chicago.

There has been a lot of interest and activity with widgets. We may provide support for JSON based (and/or JSONp based) JavaScript widgets that can be easily installed into static websites, and as of 3.5 our data feeds include support for iCalendar as well as the existing text formats (XML, JSON, etc).

Along with other major changes to CalDAV, CardDAV, and groups which will affect public calendaring in a number of ways, we will be providing much stronger support for full internationalization.

There have been many requests for a web services interface to Bedework. Currently there is no standard for web services and calendaring. At the NIST Smart Grid SDO Workshop, which we reported on in the August newsletter, CalConnect agreed to take stewardship of an effort to define such an interface.

In anticipation of CalConnect undertaking this work, Mike Douglass has been building a prototype implementation of an abstract (or generalized) calendaring API, which could be rendered, independently into the desired transport implements, such as, but not limited to, web services. This prototype allows us to explore both conceptual and implementation issues.

RFC 2245, iCalendar "Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification", the mother of all calendaring standards, has been superseded. The IETF has published RFC 5545, iCalendar bis, which obsoletes RFC 2445, which was published in November 1998. Appendix A of the RFC, found at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545, outlines the differences
between 2445 and 5545.

Contributed by: Gary Schwartz

Help us celebrate Jasig's 10th anniversary in San Diego with outstanding speakers and special events.

The focus is on innovation this year. We'll be highlighting new and established work from higher education institutions: Projects you should know about; local projects in search of community; creative work by established communities of practice; projects that exist only as a gleam in the eye of a creative developer.

Come and see presentations and seminars on new technologies soon to impact higher education. We're seeking talks on topics such as Scala, Spring 3, deployment to the Cloud, Groovy, Grails, REST, Jersey, mobile applications, etc.

We invite you to propose talks, seminars, birds-of-a-feather sessions, demos, and poster session displays on new and current campus applications: Enterprise portlets, CAS, uPortal, Bedework Calendar, Identity & Access Management, Fluid, ESUP Helpdesk, OpenRegistry, Sakai, Kuali, Internet2 Middleware Solutions, Fedora and DSpace, and others.

Talks will be presented in one of four tracks:

Designing & Developing
For developers, architects, UX designers, testers. Presentations for people who build applications.

Deploying & Integrating
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 open source projects within the enterprise infrastructure and with each other.

Managing & Governing
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.

Looking Ahead
What are the technologies that will impact higher education in the coming years? What project work, prototypes, plans, and local campus applications would you like to share with a community of your peers?

Half-day Supplementary Seminars will be held in the morning and afternoon on Sunday, March 7th as well as on Wednesday (March 10th) afternoon.

Proposals may be entered on the Jasig 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.

Submit your proposal directly at http://www.ja-sig.org/jasigconf/call-form.jsp?conf_id=jasig17 or from the conference home page, where you can find all the details: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html (Click the Call for Proposals link on the left).

We look forward to seeing you at Ten Years of Open Source Innovation!

-The Jasig 2010 Spring Conference Planning Committee

"Reporting to the Associate Director, Enterprise Systems & Services, this individual has the lead responsibility to provide vision, leadership, and technical expertise in the area of Identity and Access Management. The position provides expertise in designing the system and leading the development effort to establish a university-wide identity management system."

For full details on this posting, see: http://uhr.rutgers.edu/jobpostings/aps/Detail.asp?id=09-000705

Unicon is providing attendees with live demos of uPortal and CAS in booth #475 at the EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference. See Unicon's booth presentation schedule - http://www.unicon.net/node/1272 - to help plan your conference itinerary. 

Unicon will be participating in a Market Research Session at the EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference. Please join Unicon to explain why your institution has or has not adopted open source solutions. Also, share your thoughts about where the future of Open Source software lies and what challenges it can help overcome.

To view the details of this session, see http://www.educause.edu/E09+Hybrid/EDUCAUSE2009FacetoFaceConferen/TheFutureofFree/181012

The Fluid Project is very pleased to announce the release of Fluid Infusion 1.1.2

This release is a combination of bug fixes to existing code plus new features aimed at giving Infusion users a better experience. Infusion 1.1.2 is an incremental upgrade and preserves backwards compatibility for all production-grade components.
This release addresses some pesky bugs in Uploader, provides a sneak peak at the Mobile Fluid Skinning System, and showcases a new demo portal for easier interaction.

Infusion 1.1.2 is available for download at: http://fluidproject.org/index.php/download-infusion

What's New in this release?

New Demo Portal with improved component demos
Sneak Peak for Mobile FSS iPhone theme
Improved and simplified Image Reorderer examples and documentation
Uploader support for Firefox 3.5 and improved experience for Internet Explorer
Other bug fixes, such as more class name normalization and InlineEdit fixes

For the complete bug list go to: http://issues.fluidproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10272&tempMax=1000

If you're upgrading from Infusion 1.0, please see:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Upgrading+from+Infusion+1.0+to+Infusion+1.1.x

If upgrading from an earlier version of Infusion you may want to refer to the following Upgrade guides:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Upgrading+to+Infusion+1.0

What is Fluid Infusion?

Fluid Infusion is a JavaScript application framework for building rich, reusable, and accessible user interfaces on the Web. It includes all the tools you need for building complex interactions, including support for models and views, data binding, and unobtrusive markup rendering. Infusion also includes a growing collection of components that have been designed by a cross-disciplinary team and thoroughly tested for usability and accessibility. By incorporating the Infusion framework and components into your web application's user interface, you will make your application easier to use by more people. Easier to use means happier users.

Known Issues

An up-to-date listing of known issues with this release is available at: http://issues.fluidproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10272&tempMax=1000

Help us Build a Usable Web For Everyone

The Fluid Project is an open, collaborative community. Our goal is to improve the user experience of open source web applications, so if you are a designer or developer and want to help change the world, consider getting involved! Fluid Infusion includes not only full source code but also a design handbook that offers useful design, accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation, all backed by a growing community of interaction designers, user interface experts, and software developers contributing a wealth of expertise in usability and accessibility.

Many thanks to everyone in the community for their hard work and support for this release!

Jacob Farber http://www.Fluidproject.org

CLEVELAND - October 27, 2009 - CampusEAI Consortium, a global not-for-profit information technology services and consulting provider, has announced the immediate availability of myCampus Single Sign On (SSO) powered by Jasig's Central Authentication Service (CAS). By releasing SSO as part of the myCampus Web 2.0 Portal, CampusEAI Consortium continues to show its commitment to the Development and Implementation of Global e-Education Standards.

myCampus SSO services enhance user convenience and security for users to access multiple applications while providing their credentials (such as username and password) only once. It also allows web applications to authenticate users without gaining access to a user's security credentials, such as a password.

The myCampus CAS Integration provides:

Increased user convenience
Secure authentication to 3rd party applications (while protecting username/passwords)
Centralized control of authentication and accounts
Support for credentials including passwords, 2-factor tokens, x.509 certificates, and Windows Native
Wide industry support especially among higher-education
Support for industry standards like SAML, OpenID, and Web Services

"Leveraging the outstanding foundation provided by Jasig CAS, enhanced with support for black-box integration, bridges to additional vendor APIs, integrated administration with the myCampus platform enables us to rapidly deploy SSO at institutions regardless of size, staffing, or existing platforms." said Jason Shao, Director of Product Development for the CampusEAI Consortium.

"CampusEAI is pleased to be able to extend both the convenience of SSO to a broader range of institutions and build upon the great work done by Jasig, Yale and others." said Anjli Jain, Executive Director for the CampusEAI Consortium.

For more information on the CampusEAI Consortium or myCampus, contact Anjli Jain at anjli_jain@campuseai.org to schedule an executive one-on-one session.

Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides tangible benefits in making the enterprise more responsive to needs for new and innovative capabilities. This webinar will reinforce the value proposition of the Enterprise Portal, discuss strategies for delivering an effective SOA UI via the portal, and show examples of successful higher education enterprise portals.

To register, click here: http://www.unicon.net/node/1297

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wiki-copy: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Newsletter+-+200910+-+October+2009

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

If your institution or company has items of interest to the Jasig membership, please submit them via email to newsletter at jasig dot org.

The next issue of the monthly Jasig Newsletter will be published on or about November 18th, 2009. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Tuesday, November 17th, 2009. Thanks!

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Jasig Newsletter - October 2009

1 Upcoming Events

2 Jasig Project Updates

3 Jasig Incubator

4 Around Jasig

1 Upcoming Events

1.1 Save the Dates: Jasig Spring 2010 Conference - San Diego, California (March 2010)

1.2 EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference - Denver, Colorado (November 3-6, 2009)

1.3 Kuali Days - San Antonio, Texas (November 17 and 18, 2009)

2 Jasig Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.1.1 Community Volunteer Positions

2.1.2 CAS Distributions

2.1.3 OpenRegistry Presentations

2.2 uPortal

2.2.1 Unconference Momentum

3 Jasig Incubator

3.1 News from the Bedework Project

3.1.1 Bedework and the Unconference

3.1.2 Bedework and CalConnect

3.1.3 Bedework Development

3.1.4 Bedework Skunkworks

4 Around Jasig

4.1 Call for Proposals - Jasig 2010 - Ten Years of Open Source Innovation (March 8 - 10, 2010)

4.2 Job Posting at Rutgers - Identity Management Project Manager / Architect

4.3 Presentations in Unicon's booth #475 at EDUCAUSE 2009

4.4 EDUCAUSE 2009 Market Research Session

4.5 Infusion 1.1.2 Release

4.6 CampusEAI Consortium Releases myCampus SSO Powered by Jasig CAS

4.7 Webinar - Enterprise Portals as the User Interface of Services-Oriented Architecture (Unicon, Inc.)

Jasig Newsletter - October 2009