Newsletter - 201003 - March 2010

JASIG NEWSLETTER - MARCH 2010

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1 UPCOMING EVENTS

1.1 Advance CAMP: The Second Identity Services Summit - Raleigh, North Carolina (June 23-25, 2010)
1.2 11th Sakai Conference - Denver, Colorado, USA (June 2010)
1.3 OSCON 2010 Open Source Convention - Portland, Oregon (July 19-23, 2010)

2 JASIG PROJECT UPDATES

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 CAS 3.4, CAS 3.4,1 and CAS 3.4.2 Server Releases
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 uPortal 3.2.1 GA announcement
2.2.2 uPortal and Web Content Management
2.3 Bedework
2.3.1 Jasig Sponsors the Bedework Enterprise Calendar

3 JASIG INCUBATOR

3.1 News Reader Portlet

4 AROUND JASIG

4.1 Jasig UK - Upcoming Meeting
4.2 New Jasig Community of Practice: .NET, Open Source, and Higher Education

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1 UPCOMING EVENTS

1.1 Advance CAMP: The Second Identity Services Summit - Raleigh, North Carolina (June 23-25, 2010)

For the second year running, Jasig is co-sponsoring the Advance CAMP (ACAMP) Identity Services Summit, this year in collaboration with InCommon, Internet2, and Kuali. Last year's event was a thought provoking gathering of leaders in the higher education identity and access management universe, along with open source project staff with ongoing needs in this space. The 2010 ACAMP follows up with subsequent developments and promises to be equally stimulating.

Advance CAMP: The Second Identity Services Summit
Raleigh, North Carolina * June 23-25, 2010 * www.incommon.org/camp

Register now for the Advance CAMP (Campus Architecture and Middleware Planning) workshop, "The Second Identity Services Summit," June 23-25, 2010, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Are you a developer or architect from an open-source or other software or framework project? Want to collaborate on identity and access management approaches to ensure that your delivered software is more secure, easy to integrate and usable?

Attend the Advance CAMP: The Second Identity Services Summit to discuss identity-related implementations and alignment across projects. Attendees will:

  • Engage in solving identity-related challenges of importance to you
  • Hear about who's doing what and how to participate in or leverage their activities
  • Consider technologies such as Facebook, OAuth, OpenID, SAML, Kuali KIM, OpenSocial, Spring, and Django, among others
  • Look at possible integration solutions and develop common next steps

Architects, developers, and deployers of open source, and commercial-sponsored software, services, and frameworks will find participation most useful.

REGISTER BY MAY 10 to save money with low early-bird rates: www.incommon.org/camp

CAMP: EXPLORING AND SUPPORTING FEDERATED IDENTITY MANAGEMENT will be held just prior to Advance CAMP. Information can be found on the CAMP landing page: www.incommon.org/camp

ADVANCE CAMP is sponsored by the InCommon Federation in cooperation with Internet2, Jasig, and Kuali.

Reference: http://www.incommon.org/camp

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1.2 11th Sakai Conference - Denver, Colorado, USA (June 2010)

"Sakai community conferences have emerged as high-energy occasions for extended face-to-face interactions between our community of designers, developers, pedagogists, faculty, students, user support specialists, system administrators, educational and collaborative technology managers.
Sakai conferences provide a welcoming and informative venue for all all those interested in seeing what the Sakai community and software are all about.

The 2010 Sakai Conference will be taking place in beautiful Denver Colorado.

  • Main Conference Dates: Tuesday - Thursday, June 15-17, 2010>
  • Pre-conference sessions: Monday, June 14, 2010
  • Project Coordination Meetings: TBD"

Source: http://sakaiproject.org/static/conference-2010.htm

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1.3 OSCON 2010 Open Source Convention - Portland, Oregon (July 19-23, 2010)

"OSCON brings together over 2,500 experts, visionaries, and hackers in the trenches to explore all that open source has to offer. OSCON is the premier gathering place to gain exposure to and evaluate the new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software, and standards sweeping through the open source community. Whether you want to make it faster, more effective, or more efficient, open source helps you make it happen for the long term."

Source: http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2010

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2 JASIG PROJECT UPDATES

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.1.1 CAS 3.4, CAS 3.4.1 and CAS 3.4.2 Server Releases

Dear CAS Community,

We're pleased to announce the 3.4, 3.4.1, and 3.4.2 release of Jasig Central Authentication Service. This release includes the following features:

– 3.4

  • Upgrades to the Inspektr Auditing Library
  • Upgrades to Spring 3, Spring Security 3, and Spring Web Flow 2
  • Improved logging for single log out failure messages
  • Updated message explaining what to do when using the Services Management Tool for the first time
  • Fixed assembly build process
  • Created PrincipalNameTransformer
  • Upgrade to Perf4j for statistic and performance monitoring
  • Improved Logging of Ticket Validation Failures
  • Replace Inspektr IoC Validation Annotations with javax.validation
  • Added iPhone/Webkit mobile skin example
  • Migrated to SLF4j
  • High Availability Registry Cleaner
  • Option of Creating SAML1 or SAML2 compliant artifact ids

– 3.4.1

  • Fixed null pointer exception with throttling due to change in how Web Flow works

– 3.4.2

  • Fixed error with SAML response when an attribute has an empty list
  • Fixed lazy initialization exception with Services Management Tool due to upgrade to Hibernate

Though we're announcing all of these releases, our recommendation is to use 3.4.2.

The releases can be found here: http://www.ja-sig.org/downloads/cas/

Some notes on the upgrade process can be found here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASUM/Upgrading

We've also updated our "best practices" documentation for the Maven2 WAR Overlay process with the location of the new Jasig Repository for Release Artifacts: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASUM/Best+Practice+-+Setting+Up+CAS+Locally+using+the+Maven2+WAR+Overlay+Method

Thanks to Marvin and Pat for their assistance and Unicon's CAS Cooperative Support for sponsoring some of the development work.

Work has started on the CAS Server 3.5 release.

Cheers,
Scott

Scott Battaglia (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, Jasig Central Authentication Service

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2.2 uPortal

2.2.1 uPortal 3.2.1 GA announcement

Jasig is proud to announce the general audience release of uPortal 3.2.1. uPortal 3.2.1 is the recommended version with which to start a new uPortal deployment.

The following issues have been addressed for 3.2.1:

Bug

UP-2591 - hidden content displays when portlet is dragged
UP-2599 - Accessibility - skip navigation links are broken
UP-2632 - local hsqldb stopped when tomcat running uPortal is shutdown
UP-2639 - Source JARs should be published with artifacts
UP-2645 - maven.settings should be passed to mvn executable
UP-2647 - Portlet rendering issue, contents of one portlet are rendered in another portlet on the same page.
UP-2648 - Mist theme class missing from uportal3 skin.xml
UP-2651 - Groups selector subflow does not properly toggle class on selected group

New Feature

UP-2650 - Add ability to suppress portlets from mobile view

Task

UP-2646 - reset-user-layout.channel should not hard-code the "portletApplicationId"

Important 3.2 Upgrading Note

uPortal 3.2 has had database changes that are incompatible with the previous releases. Upgrading to uPortal 3.2 from 3.1 or older will require using the crn-export scripts in your current install and then the crn-import scripts in your new uPortal 3.2 install. Pointing a uPortal 3.2 release at an older database will very likely not work and could cause database corruption.

Downloads are available from: http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download/uportal-321
Release notes are available at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/3.2.1

uPortal Project Lead,
-Eric Dalquist

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2.2.2 uPortal and Web Content Management

uPortal Users:

The uPortal Steering Committee is interested in hearing from uPortal users about whether there is interest in integrated web content management within uPortal. Specifically, we would like to know what features you would find useful if WCM were implemented inside the portal.

To collect this information we plan to schedule one or two focus groups by phone, and we'd like to encourage your participation if this is a need on your campus. Alternatively, a description of desirable use cases for portal-based content management would also serve our purpose, if you'd prefer to use email.

To clarify, while there has not yet been any commitment from developers to allocate time to this kind of work, there has been enough interest expressed by both developers and users to warrant our spending some time investigating early options.

For one thing, there is a portlet currently in the Jasig Incubator, contributed by Misagh Moayyed, that, while incomplete, shows good potential for providing a subset of lightweight, stand-alone content management. Developers are encouraged to review the work that's been done there to date and to let us know if there is interest in collaborating on further development of this portlet.

We are also examining some other options for integrating existing WCMS applications inside uPortal. Before we get too far with this, we could use your feedback on what that kind of integration should look like.

So please let us know if you are interested in discussing this subject in more detail, participating in a focus group, or simply expressing to us your requirements for integration. Emails may be sent to the uPortal Steering Committee, cc'ed above.

Thanks,
Jonathan

Jonathan Markow, Executive Director, Jasig

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2.3 Bedework

2.3.1 Jasig Sponsors the Bedework Enterprise Calendar

San Diego, CA - March 8, 2010 - Jasig, the non-profit consortium responsible for sponsoring open source higher education technology projects, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) announced that Bedework, the enterprise calendar system, has become a fully sponsored Jasig project, having progressed successfully through the Jasig Incubator.

Bedework is the leading open source enterprise calendar built by and for the higher education community. Bedework will continue to evolve through contributions from a global community and will be sustained by support from academic institutions, commercial affiliates, and non-profit foundations. An initial Bedework Steering Committee has been formed with developer, stakeholder, and Jasig board representation from Rensselaer, Brown, Duke, Yale, Universidad Pública de Navarra, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Gary Schwartz, Bedework Project Manager at RPI, sought to align Bedework with a larger community about a year ago. Jasig seemed like a natural fit. "Jasig sponsorship for Bedework will allow us to meet the requirement that we set forth almost six years ago to make a lasting contribution to open source and higher education," said Schwartz. RPI sees the stability of a larger community, Jasig's affiliation with commercial service providers, and the consortium's collaborations with other open source projects as factors that will contribute to Bedework's sustainability.

Institutions currently deploying Bedework Calendar have been very responsive to the move. "Individuals at Duke University have been pleased to learn that Bedework is becoming a fully sponsored Jasig project," said Deborah Johnson, Assistant Vice Provost of Administrative and Community Support Services. "This assures us that the Bedework calendar software we use for our Events@Duke calendar will not only receive ongoing support, but will also benefit from a coordinated and more widespread development effort."

The University of California at Berkeley is currently contributing to further Bedework development in the area of personal calendaring. "Berkeley is excited to have the opportunity to be engaged with the Bedework project," said Michael R. Mundrane, Deputy Chief Information Officer for the University of California at Berkeley. "We looked at a number of options before choosing and it was readily apparent that this was a capable product led by an experienced and receptive RPI team. We have every expectation that this standards centric platform will be the key to delivering a high value service to our community."

The Bedework team is in the process of converting the Bedework infrastructure—mailing lists, code repository and licensing, wiki, issue tracking, etc. to Jasig hosted servers. This migration effort will be completed in time for Bedework 3.7, the next major release.

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3 JASIG INCUBATOR

3.1 News Reader Portlet

The News Reader Portlet is now officially incubating. Anthony Colebourne is the project lead and will be working with the Incubation Committee to complete the steps to graduation. Thanks, Anthony.

Susan Bramhall (Yale University), Chair, Jasig Incubation Working Group

Jasig Project Incubation: http://www.jasig.org/jasig-project-incubation

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4 AROUND JASIG

4.1 Jasig UK - Upcoming Meeting

"The 2010 meeting will be held in Bristol from Monday 21 to Tuesday 22 June. The meeting will start at 14.00 on the Monday and finish by 14.00 on the Tuesday. Details can be found at:

http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UK/2010+Meeting+Bristol

Can everyone please update the 'Interested in Attending' and 'Suggested Topics' pages with your details and items you are interested in discussing at the meeting. There is no charge for attending the meeting. Suggestions for hotels will be provided shortly."

Robert Sherratt (University of Hull)

Wiki: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UK/Home
Source: uportal-user list

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4.2 New Jasig Community of Practice: .NET, Open Source, and Higher Education

Building on the recent activity around the .NET CAS Client, Jasig is exploring supporting a new Community of Practice1 around .NET and Open Source in Higher Education.

If you are interested in helping to build a community, sharing experiences, and potentially collaborating on open source .NET projects such as CasOwa2 and the .NET CAS Client3, please join the dotnet-discuss mailing list at Jasig:

http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/dotnet-discuss

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice
2 http://github.com/wgthom/CasOwa
3 http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASC/.NET+CAS+Client+Vision+and+Roadmap

Jonathan Markow, Executive Director, Jasig

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Jasig Newsletter - March 2010

Editor: Mark Rogers (University of Manitoba)

Past editions of the Jasig Newsletter can be found in the Jasig wiki at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Newsletter

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