To the uPortal Community:

The uPortal Steering Committee invites you to Jasig's first uPortal Community Call, which will be held as a webinar on Thursday, Dec. 17th, at 1:00pm ET, hosted by the Johns Hopkins University (See connection details below). Our main agenda item is to discuss the uPortal roadmap with you. We expect to deliver a number of compelling features in the coming months. Some examples:

• An implementation of the Fluid Mobile Skinning System will enable a new theme for popular mobile browsers in release 3.2, due early in the new year.
• Subsequent support for the newest portlet standard, JSR 286, will permit inter-portlet communications, among other advantages.
• A move to "bookmark-able URLs" is another high-priority feature coming next year.
• A switch to third party code libraries for key frameworks will reduce native uPortal code, increase functionality, and permit more agile development.

In the interest of facilitating these and other changes, the project committee has decided to deprecate the IChannel interface within uPortal as of version 3.2. Our longer range plan is to eliminate Channel support in our next major release. Legacy support for Channels has imposed a continuing maintenance burden on uPortal, resulting in many additional developer hours and design compromises. Exclusive support of the next-generation Portlet standard will free us to focus more on adding value and will ultimately strengthen uPortal as a product.

We will discuss these changes at more length during our mid-December webinar. We would like to begin a dialog here and on our lists that will shed more light on users' current use of Channels. We will discuss plans to facilitate this transition (e.g., replacing supported Channels with Portlet equivalents, investigating the feasibility of a "Channel Portlet", etc.), and we also hope to determine how our community can be mutually supportive in meeting commonly shared needs emerging from this change. This discussion will continue in the coming months and we will provide sessions at our March conference for additional planning.

Other uPortal Community Calls in 2010 will provide opportunity for general feedback and questions, demonstrate a variety of campus uPortal implementations, show off community developed Portlets, and discuss new initiatives.

We hope you can join us on December 17th.

-The uPortal Steering Committee

uPortal Roadmap Webinar Facebook Event Site

Interact with fellow participants before and during the conference at the uPortal Roadmap Webinar Facebook Event Site.

Socialize, Blog, Tag, PodCast

The uPortal Steering Committee strongly encourages participants to record and share their experiences online by blogging, podcasting, and social media sharing.

Please use uportal for tagging.

Presenters

Connection Instructions

Web Conference (Screencasting)

1. Connection URL: http://connect.johnshopkins.edu/myjh
2. Select the "Enter as a Guest" radio button, type your name, and click the "Enter Room" button.
3. Read and accept the disclaimer (Click the "OK" button).
4. A request to enter the meeting will be sent to the moderator.
5. Once accepted, you will enter the uPortal Roadmap Webinar room.
6. For audio, follow the Teleconference instructions below.

Teleconference Line (Audio)

Dial-in Info: +1.888.469.2157 (USA) / +1.517.308.9319 (International)
Participant Passcode: 50948