Newsletter - 200912 - December 2009

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1.1 Jasig Spring 2010 Conference - San Diego, California (March 2010)
1.2 11th Sakai Conference - Denver, Colorado, USA (June 2010)
1.3 The 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World - Boston, Massachusetts (June 22-25, 2010)

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 Jasig CAS Client for Java 3.1.10 Release
2.1.2 OpenRegistry 0.1-M3 Release
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 uPortal Community Call
2.2.2 uPortal 3.1.2 Released
2.2.3 uPortal 3.0.5 Released

3.1 Bedework Status Update
3.2 Bedework Project Steering Committee

4.1 Jasig Board News
4.2 MailPortlet 2.0.0-alpha-7 Released
4.3 Enterprise Portals as the User Interface of a Services Oriented Architecture - Andrew Petro (Unicon, Inc.)

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Register Now for Jasig Spring 2010: "Ten Years of Open Source Innovation"

When: March 8 - 10, 2010
Supplementary Seminars March 7th and 10th
Developer Days, March 11 - 12

Town and Country Resort
500 Hotel Circle North
San Diego,CA 92108 USA
Hotel Front Desk: +1-619-291-7131
Toll Free, Reservations only: 1-800-772-8527

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

Listen to...
Gregory A. Jackson, Vice President for Policy Analysis at Educause
Justin Erenkrantz, President of the Apache Software Foundation
Rod Johnson, Founder of the Spring Framework Project

See presentations and seminars on new technologies soon to impact higher education. You'll be hearing about Spring 3, Amazon EC2, Groovy, REST, mobile applications, etc.

Spend seminar time implementing and upgrading uPortal, deploying CAS, and customizing Bedework; configure the new enterprise HelpDesk application; learn how to use uPortal's new mobile theme; build dynamic JavaScript user interfaces using the jQuery toolkit. Learn how to develop next generation portlets, lay the foundation for an enterprise identity management architecture; learn how to submit a project to the Jasig Incubator.

Attend presentations on Identity & Access Management, the Fluid Project, OpenRegistry, Kuali Workflow, Internet2 Middleware Solutions, OpenCast, OWASP, and much more...

Visit the Jasig Conference Site: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html

Check out the exciting Conference Program: http://www.ja-sig.org/jasigconf/10spring/program.jsp?conf_id=jasig17

Register now! http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/registration.html

See you in San Diego!

-The Jasig Spring 2010 Program Committee

"The 11th Annual Sakai Conference will be taking place in beautiful Denver Colorado. The conference website with registration information is scheduled to be up and running in mid-February. In the meantime, here are some important dates so you can plan your calendar:

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

Source: http://sakaiproject.org/annual-conference

"Learn. Network. Experience Open Source.

Boston. June 22-25, 2010

The Red Hat Summit and JBoss World are the premier open source events that bring together engineers, business decision makers, developers and community enthusiasts to learn about the latest in open source cloud, virtualization, platform, middleware, and management technologies.

Attendees will learn about open source advancements through: technical and business seminars, hands-on labs and demos, customer case studies, networking opportunities, partner displays, visionary keynotes, and direct collaboration with Red Hat engineers."

Source: http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2010/

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We're pleased to announce the release of CAS Client for Java 3.1.10. This release includes a small number of updates:

A minor performance enhancement (that you probably won't notice )
Further enhancement to reduce the likelihood of a new session being created on single sign out
A fix to remove a chunk warning seen in Tomcat.

We've uploaded the binaries to be synced with the public repository but they may not be in there yet. We've also posted the ZIP and TAR releases here:

http://www.ja-sig.org/downloads/cas-clients/

ScottS (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, Jasig Central Authentication Service

We're pleased to announce the release of OpenRegistry 0.1 M3. This release includes a number of bug fixes and enhancements. In addition, the following new use cases have been implemented:

Update or Edit System of Record Person via REST
Update or Edit System of Record Role via REST
Delete SoR Person
Delete SoR Role

Other changes:

Refactored XML Representations used for REST
Proper validation errors are now returned via REST
Started work on the System of Record Inbound/Outbound Framework

We encourage you to download the releases from: http://www.ja-sig.org/downloads/openregistry/

Check out our documentation here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/ORUM/Home

The OpenRegistry development is currently being led by Simon Fraser University and Rutgers University. OpenRegistry is a Jasig Incubation project.

Contributed by:
Scott Battaglia (Rutgers University) - on the openregistry-dev list

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Over 30 people participated in the first uPortal Community Call on Thursday, December 17th. The bulk of the webinar was devoted to a review of the uPortal road map for 3.2 and beyond. Eric Dalquist and Jen Bourey detailed a number of planned features and updates. More information about the uPortal road map will be posted on the web soon.

Jen also invited the community to contribute to the uPortal effort in a number of ways, including:

Helping with documentation
Collaborating on new portlets
Open sourcing your portlets
Sharing your portlets via screenshots, video demos, webinars
Helping with testing
Participating on the email lists

For those of you that were unable to attend, slides and audio from the presentation have been uploaded to http://www.slideshare.net/uportal. You can also look forward to an announcement about the next uPortal Community Call. Finally, we would like to thank Johns Hopkins University for graciously hosting this recent call.

Jasig is proud to announce the General Audience release of uPortal 3.1.2. This release is the result of feedback from the significant interest and use of the previous 3.1 releases.

Full release notes are available along with a uPortal 3.1 release overview on the 3.1.2 Release page on the Jasig wiki.

This release includes the following improvements and new features:

Improvements

UP-2513 - Change default location of portal log file, CAS and all portlet-overlay portlets
UP-2520 - Enhance layout Import/Export to preserve existing STRUCT_IDs for layouts of fragment owners
UP-2531 - Please decrease padding for .portlet-msg-* classes in uPortal-provided skins to avoid overlap
UP-2543 - Add example for MySQL to rdbm.properties
UP-2545 - Thread pool check should log at warn, not error, needs message
UP-2549 - Add periodic output buffer flushing

New Features

UP-2426 - Login Servlet should redirect to original URL
UP-2526 - Backport full layout export support

Downloads are available from: http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download/uportal-312

Release notes are available at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/3.1.2

uPortal 3.1 Manual: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPM31

I want to thank everyone who contributed to the development both directly and indirectly. Having this developer community available for both code and design insight has been invaluable.

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

Jasig is proud to announce the General Audience release of uPortal 3.0.5. This release is the result of feedback from the significant interest and use of the previous 3.0 releases.

Full release notes are available along with a uPortal 3.0 release overview on the 3.0.5 Release page on the Jasig wiki.

This release includes the following improvements and new features:

Improvements

UP-2513 - Change default location of portal log file, CAS and all portlet-overlay portlets
UP-2520 - Enhance layout Import/Export to preserve existing STRUCT_IDs for layouts of fragment owners
UP-2543 - Add example for MySQL to rdbm.properties
UP-2545 - Thread pool check should log at warn, not error, needs message
UP-2549 - Add periodic output buffer flushing

New Features

UP-2426 - Login Servlet should redirect to original URL
UP-2526 - Backport full layout export support

Source and Quick Start downloads are available on the uPortal Downloads page. http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download

I want to thank everyone who contributed to the development both directly and indirectly. Having this developer community available for both code and design insight has been invaluable.

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

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Welcome to Illinois State University!
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Illinois State University became the newest member of the Bedework community earlier this month when they went live with their new Bedework 3.5 public events calendar at http://events.illinoisstate.edu/

We were very impressed with the clean look of their new calendar, as well as their calendar administrator's page at http://www.exu.ilstu.edu/calendar/

and last, but not least, their plans for a public events calendar for students, http://rsoevents.illinoisstate.edu/events/new_student_Calendar.asp

I took the opportunity to speak with Dr. Mark Walbert, Chief Technology Officer and Deputy CIO at Illinois State University to congratulate him and his team, and to learn more about the ILSTU calendaring project. Mark was good enough to allow us to share the story with all of you,

"...The initial impetus for putting together the Campus Events Calendar Working Group was to find a replacement for the existing Events Calendar that had been in continuous use at Illinois State for over ten years. The original Web-based Calendar was home grown and written in Tango. Threatened by the loss of Tango programmer support, and concerned that a major code-based failure would lead to loss of campus events notification on the Web, I decided to put together a cross-unit group to come up with an alternative.

After more than a year of searching through several initially promising alternatives, a steering committee chose Bedework as the underlying engine for a new, updated campus events calendar. Implementation of Bedework required a cross-unit working group with expertise in a number of areas. ... This team worked regularly with the very supportive Bedework staff at RPI. The results of their collaboration were outstanding!

The new calendar format not only offers a modern, clean-design look, but has more options for individual units to create event notification and for individual users to note, remember, and share event information. It is now possible to download information about an event into a calendar file and import it into one's local computer using Outlook, iCal or some other .ics-file compliant computer calendar. One may also share an event with others via email, Facebook, Twitter, or more than a dozen other social networking applications. One may also now subscribe to an RSS feed of specific calendar events (e.g., ISU women's soccer matches) and always have up to date information about just those activities using a Web browser.

... I am quite happy with our new, Bedework-based campus events calendar. I'd also like to extend my personal thanks to your staff for all their gracious and enthusiastic help in making this changeover a success!"

Whereas we are gratified by the kind acknowledgement of the support the Bedework team provided, the truth of the matter is our assistance was very modest, and that all of the credit for the successful process and product belongs to the team at ILSTU.

Just about one ago year, in a posting similar to this one, I asked, "Are you are using Bedework? If so, please tell us so we can tell the world. When we discuss Bedework with organizations interested in Bedework, they always ask who is actually using Bedework today. ... Experience seems to indicate that the more organizations adopt Bedework, the more new organizations are willing to adopt or willing to consider adopting Bedework. We recognize that there are circumstances in which an organization cannot publicly state they have employed or embedded Bedework, but for everyone else, we would like to include your organization on the "Who's using Bedework?" page at http://www.bedework.org/bedework/update.do?artcenterkey=35

We are inspired by the outstanding work of others, and I am sure many of you are similarly inspired. Organizations considering a calendaring system are more likely to consider Bedework when they learn that organizations like theirs have chosen Bedework. So if you are a Bedework site, and not represented on our "Who's Using" list, please let us know so that we can highlight your accomplishment.

Bedework 3.6
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We are hard at work on the Bedework 3.6 release, which means there are only 9 more coding days before December 25th, our release deadline. Very briefly, 3.6 will include:

New default public skin based on Duke/Yale skins
URL Builder for feeds and widgets
Cache application (Feeder) for serving feeds and widgets
Internationalized and modularized skins
System notifications now built on JMS (ApacheMQ), allowing more modular design of the services
o Indexing reworked as outboard process
o Scheduling reworked as outboard process
o Logging of system notifications
Performance improvements
o in CalDAV
o event retrieval (system wide)
Enhancements
o improved ical subscriptions, user and public clients
o UI support for deleting collections
o miscellaneous bug fixes
o improvements to documentation

Jasig Project Status
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We are working on many of the prerequisites for moving Bedework from incubator status to a sponsored Jasig project. We will be moving our mailing lists, with advance warning of course, to Jasig in the near future. We will maintain the archives of the current lists for some reasonable period. Additional details concerning Jasig project status will accompany the Bedework 3.6 announcement.

On behalf of the Bedework development team,
Gary Schwartz

The Bedework project is in the process of forming its initial steering committee, and we are looking for volunteers to join the group.

In the Jasig governance model, project steering committees are the groups tasked with the strategic direction and operational oversight of each project. They act as primary advocates for the projects. Their responsibilities include the following:

Capture feedback from and manage communication with the community, including the project strategy and roadmap
Determine priority of deliverables for releases
Determine resource needs
Partner with institutions, commercial affiliates, and other community source projects to recruit, acquire, and develop resources from the community
Assist in any grant proposals on behalf of the project
Prioritize the use of external resources that have been allocated to the project
Monitor progress towards releases
Communicate regularly with the Jasig Board on project status, legal and intellectual property issues, etc.

The initial Bedework Steering Committee will be formed as follows:

One Jasig Board Liaison, appointed by the board. Gary Schwartz, RPI, current Bedework Project Manager, has been asked by the Jasig board to fill this role.

Three Bedework Developers. Arlen Johnson and Mike Douglass, two of the RPI developers, will be appointed for the initial term. We are asking that a third developer be nominated (or self-nominated) on the bedework-dev mailing list, with the finalist selected by vote of the current Bedework committers. Thereafter, all developer positions will be selected subject to committer voting.

Three Community Stakeholders. A "stakeholder" is someone who has a strong interest in the health, welfare, and sustainability of the project and wishes to lead community efforts on its behalf. If you fit this description, we ask you to express your interest in serving on the committee by sending an email to info@jasig.org. After the initial term, stakeholders will be chosen subject to vote of the Jasig Membership. Additional stakeholders may be added as working members, if approved by the committee.

The Jasig executive director will serve on the committee as an ex officio member.

Steering committees meet by teleconference once a month. Typically, committee members spend a couple of hours a week on project business throughout the year.

So...in summary:

Bedework stakeholders, please let us know if you are interested in joining the steering committee by emailing info@jasig.org. We'd like to hear from you by December 31.

Developers, please select someone to join Arlen and Mike as Developer Representatives on the committee by the end of this month.

Jasig is excited to welcome Bedework as a fully sponsored project and growing community. Formation of the project steering committee is an important step in this direction. We expect to report back to you on its final makeup in the beginning of the new year.

Wishing everyone a happy holiday season,

Jonathan Markow, Executive Director, Jasig
Gary Schwartz, Bedework Project Manager, RPI

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At calendar year end, we'd like to bring you up to date on the composition and status of the Jasig board. Board members are elected annually by the Jasig membership. Elections run during the summer, with new terms beginning September 1.

The current Jasig board directors are:

Tim Archer - St. Francis University
Susan Bramhall - Yale University
Aaron Godert - Cornell University
Jens Haeusser - University of British Columbia
Jim Helwig - University of Wisconsin - Madison
John A. Lewis - Unicon
Ken McCrery - Virginia Tech
Benn Oshrin - formerly Rutgers University
Katya Sadovsky - University of California - Irvine
Robert Sherratt - University of Hull
John F. (Barry) Walsh - Indiana University

Jason Shao, with CampusEAI, resigned from the board of directors last month due to conflict of interest considerations.

The board elects officers annually at the start of each term, in September. This year, board officers are as follows:

Aaron Godert, Chair
Jens Haeusser, Vice Chair
Katya Sadovsky, Secretary
Tim Archer, Treasurer

On behalf of the Jasig board, we wish you very happy holidays and a great New Year!

Jonathan Markow
Executive Director

For anyone who is interested, MailPortlet 2.0.0-alpha-7 is available in Jasig subversion at: https://www.ja-sig.org/svn/sandbox/MailPortlet/tags/rel-2.0.0-alpha-7

Also updated: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/PLT/MailPortlet http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/PLT/MailPortlet+User+Manual

Change log:

MPT-23 - (Minor UI fix) Now shows last breadcrumb correctly for create mail account and delete mail account views in configuration

(Note: Duke is now running in production with uPortal 2.5.3 with 2.0.0-alpha-7.)

Thanks,
Gary Weaver (Duke University)

"I had the privilege of presenting a Webinar today entitled "Enterprise Portals as the User Interface to Services Oriented Architecture" and in this post I share the slides."

See Andrew's full blog entry (with slide deck) at: http://www.unicon.net/blog/apetro/portal_as_ui_of_soa

Andrew's Blog: http://www.unicon.net/blog/apetro

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Editor: Mark Mark (University of Manitoba)

Special thanks to Scott Battaglia, Jim Helwig, Jonathan Markow and Danielle Wilhelmy for assistance and advice on this issue.

The next issue of the monthly Jasig Newsletter will be published on or about January 20th, 2010. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted via email to newsletter at jasig dot org no later than Tuesday, January 19th, 2010. Thanks for all your support!

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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Newsletter - 200912 - December 2009

JASIG NEWSLETTER - DECEMBER 2009

1 UPCOMING EVENTS

2 JASIG PROJECT UPDATES

3 JASIG INCUBATOR

4 AROUND JASIG

1 UPCOMING EVENTS

1.1 Jasig Spring 2010 Conference - San Diego, California (March 2010)

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

1.3 The 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World - Boston, Massachusetts (June 22-25, 2010)

2 JASIG PROJECT UPDATES

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.1.1 Jasig CAS Client for Java 3.1.10 Release

2.1.2 OpenRegistry 0.1-M3 Release

2.2 uPortal

2.2.1 uPortal Community Call

2.2.2 uPortal 3.1.2 Released

2.2.3 uPortal 3.0.5 Released

3 JASIG INCUBATOR

3.1 Bedework Status Update

3.2 Bedework Project Steering Committee

4 AROUND JASIG

4.1 Jasig Board News

4.2 MailPortlet 2.0.0-alpha-7 Released

4.3 Enterprise Portals as the User Interface of a Services Oriented Architecture - Andrew Petro (Unicon, Inc.)

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Jasig Newsletter - December 2009