Newsletter - 201106 - June 2011

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Jasig 2011 Elections - Call for Nominations
Jasig Website Makeover
Jasig Announces Phase I Completion of uMobile

phpCAS Release Announcement

uPortal 4.0 is almost here!

Bedework 3.7 Released
Bedework Futures Survey

Incubation News

Jasig Celebrates Successful Annual Conference in Denver
Kuali Days 2011 - Call for Proposals
Grouper Survey - Invitation to Participate

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Jasig is pleased to announce the opening of nominations for the Board of Directors, the uPortal Steering Committee, and the CAS Steering Committee.

Jasig, Inc. is a non-profit, 501(c)3, international consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates supporting community-driven, open source software development and promoting open system architectures for higher education.

The Board is the group that manages strategic direction and policy for the entire organization, oversees all projects and events, provides shared infrastructure, and takes responsibility for the licensing and protection of intellectual property. The board also ensures that project management is consistent with the organization’s mission, and makes sure that Jasig operates within its fiscal resources.

The 2011 elections will fill four (4) vacant Director positions that will result from an annual planned cycling of Board positions. According to the Jasig bylaws, Board Directors shall serve for a term of three years. According to the Jasig bylaws, Board Directors may serve two consecutive terms, if re-elected.

Potential candidates should be aware of ongoing plans to pursue a corporate consolidation with the Sakai Foundation. If/when this occurs, a new set of bylaws will govern the newly merged organization and any Jasig Board incumbent’s term will be terminated. Steering committee positions will likely carry over into the new organization.

The uPortal Steering Committee will be filling one (1) Jasig member-elected stakeholder position in this current election cycle. Community representatives serve for a period of two years and may be re-elected to a second consecutive term. Anyone from the Jasig uPortal community may serve in an elected stakeholder representative role. Elected members need not be drawn from Jasig member organizations. Nominations of others and/or self-nominations are encouraged.

Please send nominations by email to elections@jasig.org.

You can learn more about the uPortal Steering Committee, its purpose and responsibilities, at http://www.jasig.org/uportal/steering-committee

The CAS Steering Committee will be filling one(1) stakeholder representative position, resulting from an annual planned cycling of positions. Anyone from the Jasig CAS community may serve in an elected stakeholder representative role. Elected members need not be drawn from Jasig member organizations. Nominations of others and/or self-nominations are encouraged.

Please send nominations by email to elections@jasig.org.

You can learn more about the CAS steering committee, its purpose and responsibilities, athttps://wiki.jasig.org/display/CASST/Home

Steering committees serve as advocates for their project. They exercise strategic and operational oversight, encourage broadened support, and seek to increase participation from the community.

The slates for these committees are open to all. While voting is cast by Jasig members, membership is not required to serve.

These committees, and board, meet in person at least once a year at a Jasig event or at such times and places as designated by the Chair. Members are expected to attend monthly meetings and regularly conduct business electronically. The Board of Directors and other committees meet monthly by teleconference.

Prospective board and committee members should be prepared to serve in a proactive way. If elected, they are asked to take on oversight responsibilities, recruit others in the community to help out, when appropriate, serve as spokespeople for the organization or project, and occasionally lead initiatives on behalf of Jasig and its projects. The time commitment is manageable, usually amounting to several hours a month. Some key success factors are good communication skills and a keen desire to be helpful!

Board and Committee members are not compensated for their work. Nominees will be expected to confirm that their organizational leadership approves of this commitment of time if elected.

Nominations for all positions must be emailed to elections@jasig.org no later than 5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) on Friday July 9, 2011. As stated earlier, anyone can be nominated to stand for election to these positions. Self-nominations are also encouraged. Receipt of any nomination you submit will be confirmed. The Jasig Election Coordinator will notify all nominees and confirm their willingness and ability to run for election. If they agree, a short bio and a personal statement will be solicited and posted on the Jasig wiki.

Following the nomination period, elections are scheduled to be conducted from July 15th through August 1st. Votes will be cast by email to elections@jasig.org , with results announced soon after August 10th. Votes will be submitted by the designated Institutional Representatives from our member organizations. More complete directions for voting will follow. Newly elected committee members and board directors will join group meetings during the summer and officially assume their new responsibilities in September 2011.

A current list of Jasig Members [1] eligible to vote include the Institutional Members and Jasig Partners on the Jasig wiki.

Thank you very much for helping us present the most qualified slate of candidates. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Patty Gertz, Executive Director
Deborah K. Smith, Election Coordinator and Jasig Administrator
CONCENTRA-CMS

[1] https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JSG/Jasig+Members

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Keep an eye on www.jasig.org and www.uportal.org over the next few weeks. We have been working with WebChuckWeb, our service provider, on refreshing the web site. The new version will have a fresh look and make it easier to find information on all the Jasig projects.

Stay tuned!

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Jasig is pleased to announce the Phase I completion of uMobile. With uMobile, a new open source mobile initiative, institutions can expedite the delivery of campus applications, content, and data to everyone using mobile devices. Phase I of the uMobile project involved framework development, software updates, and the first public implementation of the project: conference apps for Jasig ’11 and Sakai ’11.

The conference apps were designed to keep conference attendees informed and connected. The apps assisted users in tailoring a personalized conference experience and networking with each other via an attendee directory; news feeds; maps, including recommended dining locations; weather reports; calendars of conference events; social networking feeds; and video content.

With uMobile, colleges and universities can deliver customized content and functionality into branded apps that render on mobile devices (smartphones). Initial native support is for the Android and iPhone. uMobile enables a single code base to provide both browser-based and native-app functionality. Features of uMobile constitute campus maps, directory, announcements, search, courses, course schedule, campus news/ RSS, and calendar. Native device integration includes contacts, maps, and email composition. uMobile boasts technologies and development tools for authentication and authorization, user and group management, and layout management capabilities. These technologies and tools are built on the production-proven uPortal framework.

The project has received financial support from Ohio University, Yale University, Cornell University, Oakland University, and Unicon. uMobile is currently governed by the uPortal Steering Committee, specifically under the new uMobile Working Group. The group is currently made up of members representing University of Hull, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, Yale University, and Unicon.

Presently, 15 institutions have expressed interest in uMobile. To get involved, please contact Patty Gertz, the Jasig Executive Director by email at ed@jasig.org. To learn more about uMobile, please visit http://www.jasig.org/umobile.

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phpCAS Release Announcement

Dear CAS Community,

We are pleased to announce the new 1.2.2 release [1] for phpCAS. This release contains a few minor bug fixes and some improvements to the existing client. The release is of course fully backwards compatible.

The biggest new feature is a new modular proxied request system. This now allows proxied HTTP POST requests and also improves the existing HTTP GET and IMAP code.

Another major effort during this release was the cleanup and improvement of the in-code documentation, wiki documentation and examples. We have tried to harmonize them and remove duplication between wiki [2], distributed files and code doc [4] to allow better maintenance of the docs. Any feedback is welcome.

We now ship 17 different examples [3] for simple and advanced use cases with one central config. This enables the user to quickly set up and discover all the phpCAS features and is also useful for anyone testing the different features of a CAS Server.

A full change log [5] is available.

[1] http://downloads.jasig.org/cas-clients/php/1.2.2/
[2] https://wiki.jasig.org/display/CASC/phpCAS
[3] https://wiki.jasig.org/display/CASC/phpCAS+examples
[4] http://downloads.jasig.org/cas-clients/php/current/docs/api/index.html
[5] https://source.jasig.org/cas-clients/phpcas/trunk/docs/ChangeLog

Cheers,
Joachim

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uPortal 4.0 is almost here!

The first release candidate was made available in May and the second is expected shortly. Our plans are to release a final version in July. For more information on what will be included in uPortal 4.0, see the earlier announcement at http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download/uportal-400-rc1.

While you can download the RC1 quickstart, we also have a live nightly build of uPortal trunk up for all to see and play with at https://up40-nightly.jasig.org

This site is rebuilt from the latest code in trunk every night with a completely fresh db. It is essentially a live hosted version of the uPortal quickstart. Feel free to play around and if you find issues please report them in Jira: https://issues.jasig.org

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Bedework 3.7 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of Bedework 3.7.

The release is now available for download at:http://www.jasig.org/bedework/download

For more information, please see the release notes at:http://www.jasig.org/bedework/download/bedework-3.7

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Bedework Futures Survey

Dear Bedework users, administrators, and developers,

The Bedework Steering Committee is gathering ideas for ways to improve Bedework. To kick off the effort, the steering committee asked a few of its members to solicit ideas from Bedework users and administrators they know. From that effort the steering committee compiled a list of 25 suggestions.

We've put together this brief survey as a mechanism to gather your feedback and to provide you with an opportunity to make your own suggestions. In the survey, most of the 25 suggestions are annotated with tracking numbers in the form bwk-nn. If you'd like to read about any of the suggestions in more detail, you can visit the Jasig Issue Tracker.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to fill out the survey; unless you have a lot of suggestions, we don't think it will take you more 10 minutes to complete. We look forward to hearing from you.

If you have questions about this survey, please contact Barry Leibson.

On behalf of the Bedework Steering Committee,

Deb Johnson, Duke University (Calendar manager)
Barry Leibson, Girasole Solutions (Bedework contributor and consultant)
Eric Wittmann, Yale University (Technical Lead - Yale Events Calendar)

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Incubation News

The incubation committee is working with the board of Jasig to develop a governance strategy for the numerous projects now proceeding through incubation. As the Jasig portfolio continues to grow we need to ensure that projects have up to date road maps, documentation, web sites and healthy developer communities. We'll be needing volunteers to be on product boards or steering committees into the future. I hope everyone who is a stakeholder in these projects will consider lending some time to ensuring their long term sustainability. Your input and feedback is always welcome and valuable.

Spotlight on Incubating Projects
The incubation committee will be spotlighting one or two of the incubating projects in each newsletter. The primary function of incubation is to create a strong community around the project. New participants, testers and users are strongly encouraged to use the mailing lists to engage with these projects.

IT Ecosystem is a product developed at University of Chicago. Tom Barton says "The first thing to know about this project is that it's a good tool for attacking a very hard problem - being able to understand, quantify, analyze, and visualize how all of the complexity in a technical infrastructure nets out to the services it provides." The University of Chicago has used the tool to comprehensively document their infrastructure. A more approachable and highly valuable task would be to map out all the dependencies underlying a single service such as a portal. Anyone interesting in trying it out can download it from the U Chicago wiki.<https://wiki.uchicago.edu/display/integration/IT+Ecosystem> The project is also in need of developers as the original author is now moving on to a job outside of higher ed.

The Sakai Connector is a portlet developed by Steve Swinsburg of the Australian National University. It renders tools from a Sakai environment inside uPortal. It is completely configurable, and each user can choose a tool from any of their Sakai sites to display in the portal. You can check out more about it on the Jasig Portlet Wiki (at https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Sakai+connector+portlet ) or the Sakai Wiki (at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF2010/Connecting+Sakai+and+uPortal ). Any site running both uPortal and Sakai should check this out.

Susan Bramhall
Incubation Committee Chair

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Jasig, the higher-ed open source consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates, held its annual conference in Denver the week of May 22. A broad range of attendees participated in a successful week of collaboration, innovation, and learning. Highlights of the conference included:

Announcing uMobile [1], the latest sponsored Jasig project
Previews of the upcoming uPortal 4 [2] release
The success of our incubation process, shepherding new projects from concept to production
Continued progress on bringing the Jasig and Sakai communities together
New efforts to partner with Kuali, I2 and Sakai in the area of Identity and Access Management
Engaging conversations with the 2-3-98 Project on the strategic role of open source in higher education, from development to awareness and adoption

Please visit the conference site to see the wide range of presentation materials.https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JCON/Spring+2011+Conference+Presentation+Materials

Thanks again to our sponsors, Vasco [3] and Unicon [4]. For more information about Vasco products, please send email to David Nayes at dna@vasco.com. For more information about Unicon, please send email to David Lipari at dlipari@unicon.net .

[1] http://www.jasig.org/sites/jasig.webchuckhosting.com/files/uMobile_brochure_0.pdf
[2] http://www.jasig.org/sites/jasig.webchuckhosting.com/files/uPortal4_brochure.pdf
[3] http://www.vasco.com/
[4] http://www.unicon.net/

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Kuali Days 2011 will be in Indianapolis, November 14-16. Here is a link to the Event. http://kuali.org/kuali-days-2011

Kuali is looking for presenters on Open source topics of interest and would like to solicit the Jasig Community for proposals. We will be closing the call for proposals July 1, or will extend, if needed.

Please let me know if you can send a message to your members or post this information on your website.

If you have any questions, just let me know.

Thanks!

Pat Slabach
Director of Communications and Collaboration
Kuali Foundation, Inc.

pslabach@kuali.org
www.kuali.org

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The Grouper Groups Management Toolkit team invites community participation in a survey designed to:
1) Assess adoption of Grouper
2) Inform the Grouper team on the requirements of the current and potential user base, so that we can better meet the community's needs

Your ideas are valued and your participation in the survey is greatly appreciated, whether or not you are currently a Grouper user. You can access the survey at:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YDXZKWD

If you would like to view the entire survey for reference prior to starting it, a PDF is available at http://www.internet2.edu/grouper/docs/GrouperSurvey_201106_.pdf

The survey will be open through July 11. Thank you in advance for your input.

The Grouper Team

www.internet2.edu/grouper

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Editor: Mark Rogers (University of Manitoba)

Online edition at: http://www.jasig.org/jasig-newsletters/june-2011

Past editions of the Jasig Newsletter can also be found in the Jasig wiki at: https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JSG/Newsletter

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JASIG NEWSLETTER - JUNE 2011

JASIG ANNOUNCEMENTS

JASIG PROJECTS

Central Authentication Service (CAS)

uPortal

Bedework

Jasig Project Incubation

AROUND JASIG

JASIG ANNOUNCEMENTS

Jasig 2011 Elections - Call for Nominations

Jasig Board

uPortal Steering Committee

CAS Steering Committee

Requirements for Serving

Election Process

Jasig Website Makeover

Jasig Announces Phase I Completion of uMobile

JASIG PROJECTS

Central Authentication Service (CAS)

uPortal

Bedework

Jasig Project Incubation

AROUND JASIG

Jasig Celebrates Successful Annual Conference in Denver

Kuali Days 2011 - Call for Proposals

Grouper Survey - Invitation to Participate

Jasig Newsletter - June 2011