200711 November 2007 JASIG Newsletter uPortal contribution

Many uPortal developers and deployers gathered in scenic New Brunswick for the Rutgers-hosted JA-SIG UnConference. Fun, comradery, user experience design, and working code were enjoyed by many. Andrew Petro especially appreciated becoming more aware of Fluid resources in support of uPortal development and the positively influential role Fluid is playing in current uPortal efforts. While some Fluid developers and designers came to the conference already well acquainted with uPortal, for others the UnConference served as an intense introduction to JA-SIG culture. Others were particularly excited about the prospect of sharing more portlets via project incubation and improved Clearinghouse-like listings discussed at this event, Drew Wills' import-export tooling further demonstrated and shared, and the production deployment of the UW-Madison Web Proxy Portlet into additional portals beyond Wisconsin.

In the post-conference collaboration and discussion, Jen Bourey of Yale University coded a prototype of a user feedback reporting and analysis system inspired by that in Collier Jones' impressive myUMBC (see also demo. uPortal developers worked with portal developers from several institutions to gather requirements around notifications, linking, and session management.

While Eric Dalquist has done a great deal of work to prepare uPortal 2.6.1 through a series of pre-GA releases, he has handed off to Andrew Petro the task of finalizing and posting a uPortal 2.6.1 GA, which is expected to arrive in the latter part of the week of November 19th.

Progress on the newly defined uPortal 3 continues rapidly. Susan Bramhall and Dan Ellentuck updated uPortal 3 to use the stand-alone Person Directory API and are continuing to do the same for the Groups and Permissions APIs. Pluto 1.1 integration is the only required remaining feature before a release candidate and good progress is being made. Of course, uPortal 3 will be even better if it can contain any of a number of available optional features, which will be more or less included depending on involvement of additional developers. It is never too late to jump in on uportal-dev@lists.ja-sig.org and get involved with development.