End-user Requirements

Requirements in support of the end users of the portal (in an academic environment, students, faculty, staff, etc.)

Accessibility

• High-contrast Display
• large text display
• assistive technologies support (screen readers, etc.)

User Customization & Personalization

• pushed content - content groups automatically displayed to users
• select content groups to be available to users for subscription based on user groups or attributes ("pulled content")
• distributed content group management (e.g. allow a selected user to modify/maintain 1 fragment)
• allow "locked down" content - content that cannot be moved/removed by users
• allow users to customize the content displayed
• allow users to personalize displayed content (categories, #items, stored settings)
• display channels by category
• optionally allow only certain categories of channels to be available on a fragment

User Experience

• customizable user layout/preferences
• selectable skins/look & feel
• easy way to discover/add content
• standard, semantic markup
• cross-browser/device rendering support
• graceful degradation for various client levels (e.g. no JS, CSS, text only)
• easy way to see what channels are new (e.g. channels that have been added since your last visit)
• ability to search channels (e.g., by name, keyword, date added)
• ability to deep link to a channel (i.e., specify a static URL that logs the person on, if necessary, and then takes them directly to that channel)

Friend Access

• ability to grant access to others (e.g., parents)
• ability to specify which channels other designated indivuals may see

Infrastructure to support:

• Student Functionality
• Faculty Functionality
• Reasearchers Functionality
• Administrative Staff Functionality
• Guests Functionality
• Vendor and Partner Functionality

Administrator Requirements

Requirements in support of people who configure portal content and policies. Channel publishers, layout owners, etc.

Administration

• Multiple Admin Access Methods
• Modify
  • users (GUI, config file)
  • groups (GUI, config file)
  • permissions (GUI, config file)
• Publish channels (GUI, config file)
  • Channel import and export
  • Allow meta information (key words) to be published with a channel
• Error Reporting
  • logging
  • notification of error conditions
• Layout
  • Specify layout (GUI, config file)
  • Transparently replace channels

Statistics & reporting

• Useful metrics and statistics out of the box
  • channel usage, performance
  • fragment usage, performance
  • user logins
• Locally extendable metrics
• Exposed via reports, JMX, etc.
• Flexible persitance (file, database)

Generic Channel Support

• web proxy
• iframe
• XML/XSLT
• RSS / feed reader
• Portlet (JSR-168)
• WSRP Consumer

General Purpose Channels

• Weather Channel
• Feed Reader
• Announcements
• Alerts Viewer
• Bookmarks
• Menu
• Webmail
  • New mail notification in header area
• Content Channel
• CMS Integration Channel

Evaluator Requirements

Requirements for individuals evaluating utilizing or deploying a portal based on the uPortal framework.

• Public demonstration deployment
• Quickstart release
• Documentation of features and capabilities
  • Comparison with other portal solutions

Deployer Requirements

Requirements in support of systems programmers and staff deploying uPortal, designers locally skinning uPortal.

Deployment

• property management
• support over-riding default configuration without rebuilding the application
• support loadbalanced/clustered environments
• Runs on a FOSS stack (Tomcat servlet container)
• Runs without modification under JDK 1.4+

Authentication

• WebISO integration
  • CAS support
• LDAP Authentication
• Container Managed Authentication
• Proxy Authentication (authenticate user into back-end resources)
• Ability to chain authentication

Institutional Customization & Personalization

• simple to brand institutional look and feel
• Great default skins
• simple local enabling/disabling of features
• integration with directory services

Internationalization & Localization

• internationalized message storage & generation
• localized messages automatically selected from user agent
• architecture for separating translation strings, producing & updating translations

Groups & Authorization

• integrate with externally defined groups (ldap, db, etc)
• allow locally defined ad-hoc groups defined and managed through the portal UI
• distributed group administration
• expose uPortal groups information via LDAP abstraction via embedded LDAP server (for use, integration with other systems)

Person Information

• integrate with external sources (ldap, db, etc)
• allow local attributes defined and managed through the portal UI and API
• ability to merge attribute information from multiple sources

Documentation

• Comprehensive documentation of configuration and deployment

Developer Requirements

Requirements in support of programmers, designers, and other developers who customize, extend, and write widgets for uPortal.

APIs and extension points

• Authentication API for integrating with a local SSO or other authentication scheme

Code quality

• Pervasive source-level logging as a best practice for logging the behavior of the portal
• Comprehensive unit test coverage to prevent regression and support testing of local customizations
• Thorough specification of APIs
• Adoption of patterns and best practices yielding readable and maintable code

Documentation

• Appropriate use of external libraries and common practices such that external projects' documentation applies to uPortal
• Comprehensive documentation of intended extension points

Other

Event handling

• notify users when events occur
• notify channels when user generated events occur (e.g. login, logout, etc.)
• general event subscribe, publish support. Support for registration of event listeners.

Migration

• db conversion/migration tools from previous uP versions
• ability to export & restore data (e.g. between production tiers/instances)
• easy to integrate change/progress to uP core to local deployments

Standards Support

• JSR-168 Portlet Support
• WSRP Consumer Support
• WSRP Producer Support
• IChannel support
• Database independent

Scalablity, Performance and Reliability

• Ability to serve thousands of users simultaneously
• Compatible with application server clustering
• Session replication support
• Transparent failover support
• Ability to run for weeks without restarting