Newsletter - 200804 - April 2008

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1 Welcome
1.1 Editor's Message

2 JA-SIG Project Updates
2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 CAS 3.2.1 Released
2.1.2 Packaging mod_auth_cas for Linux
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 uPortal 3.0.0-GA Released
2.2.2 Deployed uPortals Update

3 Community News
3.1 JA-SIG Releases uPortal 3.0.0-GA for Production Use
3.2 CREE report on delivering library services via a portal
3.3 CAS Contribution - UC Berkeley and Unicon
3.4 Johns Hopkins Goes 2.6.1+

4 Upcoming Events
4.1 Don't Miss Out! Register for JA-SIG TODAY!!
4.2 Kuali Days VI - Save the date!
4.3 9th Sakai Conference (July 1-3, 2008)
4.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 (October 28-31, 2008)

5 JA-SIG in the Blogosphere
5.1 Spring Conference
5.2 Luminis Developers Network
5.3 Jonathan's JA-SIG Weblog

6 Job Postings
6.1 Applications System Integrator (Cornell University)
6.2 Application Developer (Rutgers University)

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Welcome to the April 2008 issue of the JA-SIG Newsletter.

We have more great news this month for our headline projects, CAS and uPortal, with significant releases being announced in the past week. The new version of uPortal looks fantastic and the CAS integration works like a charm. You will find the appropriate congratulations in the articles.

The Community News section contains the formal JA-SIG announcement on the uPortal 3.0 release, along with a piece on the CREE project, a proposed CAS contribution, and Johns Hopkins University's migration to uPortal 2.6.1.

Our Events calendar contains, among other announcments, one final appeal for registrations to the Spring Conference. You really don't want to miss this one. And you can read all about why you don't want to miss it in the Conference blogs, also highlighted toward the end of this edition of the newsletter.

And finally, we have posted a few job opportunities within the community which will surely be of great interest.

As always, feel free to send your comments or content to newsletter at jasig dot org.

Hope to see you in Saint Paul!
Mark Mark (University of Manitoba), Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

We're pleased to announce that CAS 3.2.1 has been released. It fixes a number of minor issues with the initial 3.2 release and offers a few enhancements. Please see the change log here: http://www.ja-sig.org/issues/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10007&styleName=Html&version=10512

You can download it from the usual spot: http://www.jasig.org/products/cas/downloads/

Thanks!
ScottS (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, JA-SIG Central Authentication Service

A number of efforts are underway to package mod_auth_cas for various Linux distributions. Some of these efforts have led to requests for inclusion in the official distribution repositories. If you would like to get involved, please drop an email to the cas-dev mailing list, and check the Wiki page at http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/swPI.

This week, we announced the General Availability release of uPortal 3.0.0. This release is the culmination of a significant effort by many people in the uPortal community to take a revolutionary step with the uPortal code base.

This release is ready for general use. If you do find any issues please file them in the JA-SIG Issue Tracker.

You can download the "uPortal-only", "Quick Start", and "Developers Quick Start" releases at: http://www.uportal.org/download.html

See the formal announcement in this edition of the newsletter for full details on this release.

The community maintains a list of Deployed uPortals on the wiki:

http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/Deployed+uPortals

This page can be of tremendous help to others either looking to adopt uPortal or scale their own implementation. Please take a few minutes to update the particulars of your uPortal deployment.

If you are not yet listed and have an implementation, including a prototype or a packaged implementation like SunGard's Luminis product, you are highly encouraged to add your own entry.

The JA-SIG uPortal Project Steering Committee is extremely pleased to announce the release of uPortal 3.0, the next generation community source portal platform designed by and for the higher education community. The new release marks a major, evolutionary step forward for the award-winning project. Version 3.0 has brought the rock solid, high performing uPortal 2.x product to a new level, incorporating current best practices in enterprise Java. The entire uPortal community can unite on one branch moving forward, and it is now possible for everyone to migrate to the latest version of uPortal when appropriate for their institution.

uPortal 3.0 builds upon the flexibility and reliability of uPortal 2.x while providing an attractive look and feel using improved JavaScript libraries, even more robust portlet support, a modern build environment, use of leading Java frameworks (Spring), and other enhancements, bringing the larger deployments and performance already achieved in uPortal 2 in easier reach of more uPortal adopters.

"JA-SIG is proud of the work that has resulted uPortal 3.0," said executive director Jonathan Markow. "Our community of developers has put together a release that gives uPortal a solid, improved platform for future growth---one that provides immediate benefits to users, implementers, developers, and designers."

"3.0 is a significant step for the uPortal framework which positions it to take advantage of many exciting technologies such as Portlets 2.0, Java Persistence Architecture, and the Spring Framework," said Eric Dalquist, uPortal 3.0 Release Engineer.

"The Yale portal team is very excited about the release of uPortal 3.0," said Susan Bramhall, Sr. Developer, Yale University ITS. "It provides a really solid base for carrying forward our YaleInfo portal user experience extensions. We will be testing a version of YaleInfo built on uPortal 3.0 with users later this month. Thank you, uP3 team!"

A new theme and skin provide a fresh and attractive look out of the box. It's now far easier for implementers to customize the look of uPortal. Skinning can be done entirely with CSS.
uPortal's out-of-the-box default content has been changed to better demonstrate the portal's features.
A comprehensive set of import/export scripts now makes it easier to upgrade to the latest version of uPortal.
Portlet support is now provided using the Pluto 1.1 container, which will allow us to more readily support JSR 286, the more versatile and powerful Portlet 2.0 standard, once it has been finalized.
A Maven-based project structure and build process is now standard, providing robust build, reporting and packaging tools.
Core components of the framework have been migrated to the Spring Java Development Framework, making it simpler for developers to work with uPortal. The migration to Spring has also served to significantly reduce the amount of underlying code.
Given the success and widespread adoption of JA-SIG CAS for authentication, CAS is now configured as the default authentication system for uPortal.
A unified caching framework provides multiple cache implementation options including clusterable and distributable caches.
Remote management using JMX makes it easier to monitor performance and troubleshoot problems.

Source and Quick Start downloads are available on the uPortal Downloads page. The Quick Start version comes with uPortal, Tomcat 5.5, Ant, Maven and is ready to run on any machine with JDK5 or later. There is also a developer targeted dashboard site which includes JavaDocs, dependency information and test reports.

JA-SIG recommends that institutions consider using uPortal 3 for new portal installations. Several large schools are already working on upgrading their installations to this new version, assuring that this version will receive the high level of support that the community has been accustomed to with uPortal 2.

Institutions currently using uPortal 2 can also be assured that support for that version continues.

Thanks to all who have helped!

uPortal 3.0 release management, Spring migration - Eric Dalquist from UW-Madison
Maven project structure and build - Thanks to Elliot Metsger form Johns Hopkins and Eric Dalquist
Pluto 1.1 portlet container - Thanks to Eric Dalquist
Import / Export scripts - Thanks to Andrew Wills from Unicon
New Theme, Skin and default content - Thanks to Gary Thompson from Unicon and Jen Bourey from Yale
CAS 3.2 as the default authentication mechanism - Thanks to Scott Battaglia from Rutgers, Andrew Petro from Unicon and Jen Bourey
Thanks to Tuyhang Ly from Rutgers for testing.

We encourage you to test drive the uPortal 3.0 Quick Start download. You can join in uPortal discussions by signing up to the uportal-user mailing list or the other uPortal and JA-SIG mailing lists. You can also visit the project wiki, where there are many helpful pages.

You can file bug reports or track the status of existing issues in the JA-SIG Issue Tracker at http://www.ja-sig.org/issues/browse/UP

And please consider having your institution join JA-SIG! In addition to voting privileges and conference discounts, membership fees help make uPortal even better.

The CREE Project (http://www.hull.ac.uk/cree/) initially (2004-5) investigated the presentation of Internet search tools within a variety of institutional environments, including institutional portals, and demonstrated the viability of using JSR-168 and WSRP for this purpose. The CREE Extension Project (2007-8) is currently expanding on the development of portlets that can be used to search library resources, making use of library standards including Z39.50 and OpenURL.

The current phase of the project has also held a workshop with a variety of stakeholders from across the UK to capture views on the delivery of library services in general via an institutional portal. The report from this workshop and accompanying literature review, plus presentations from the day, are now available from the CREE Project website at: http://www.hull.ac.uk/cree/workshop.

We are grateful to the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) for funding to support both phases of the CREE Project.

Chris Awre
University of Hull
c.awre at hull.ac.uk

UC Berkeley, in partnership with Unicon, is proud to announce a proposed contribution to the CAS project. This contribution enables institutions to implement a "Second-Level CAS Server" to authenticate applications that require an increased level of security. UC Berkeley liked the idea proposed by Unicon's Andrew Petro, which promised to solve this challenge with two "chained" CAS servers without having to modify CAS server sources.

UC Berkeley already has CAS as its Web Single Sign-On system in place, but access to some sensitive Web applications requires a second method of authentication. Users who require access to the sensitive Web applications are first required to sign in to Primary CAS, and only then may they sign in to Secondary CAS. This server uses a different credential than Primary CAS. That way, only upon successful authentication with both CAS servers is the user allowed to continue to the Web application. An added requirement was that this solution must work in a clustered (JBoss Cache) environment.

This solution did not require any modifications to the Primary CAS installation. As far as it is concerned, Secondary CAS is just another service in need of authentication. Secondary CAS, however, had to be enhanced to work itself as a "CASified" application. Most of the work was accomplished by adding new implementations of well-documented CAS interfaces. This prevented modifications to the core CAS code.

This contribution is currently considered as "Feature Under Consideration" for addition to CAS. For more information please see the detailed description here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/5wPI

After much anticipation, Johns Hopkins is happy to announce that we successfully upgraded to uPortal 2.6.1+ earlier this month:

http://my.johnshopkins.edu/

A very special thanks to Drew Wills from UNICON who provided us with a painless upgrade path and for the data import/export wizardry via Cernunnos. For more details regarding our upgrade experience, Drew and I will be presenting a session (Upgrading uPortal: myJohnsHopkins) at the upcoming uPortal conference.

In the coming weeks, we will also be rolling out full Active Directory integration via the newly developed SmartLdapGroupStore. More kudos to Drew Wills and UNICON for helping sculpt this vision into reality for us.

We would also like to extend a "thank you" to all of the active developers and the JA-SIG community as a whole for continually delivering quality improvements and upgrades. See you in St. Paul!

Contributed by:
Chris Doyle
Johns Hopkins University
Sr. System Software Engineer, IT@JH

REGISTRATION
There is still time to register for this "first of its kind" jointly-planned Community Source conference. There are also 13 Supplementary Seminars on the agenda that are sure to add exceptional value to your travel dollars. For more information, go to http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/08spring/registration.html

HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS
You can still make reservations at the conference hotel, the Crowne Plaza St. Paul-Riverfront. For information about how to make these reservations, go to http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/08spring/accom-travel.html

POSTER SESSIONS
View nearly a dozen poster sessions Monday night while enjoying evening beverages and appetizers. There is still space for you to present a poster!

We look forward to seeing you in Saint Paul, Minnesota, April 27-30 for what promises to be a fantastic program!

Jonathan Markow
on behalf of the 2008 JA-SIG Conference Program Committee

SAVE THE DATE

Kuali Days VI is scheduled for May 13 and 14, 2008 at the Westin Chicago Northwest. We will have a full agenda of content on Kuali Financial System (multiple tracks), Kuali Research Administration, Kuali Student System, and Kuali Rice (infrastructure and services like workflow). By popular request, we will also have a half day seminar in advance of the conference on Kuali Financial System basics.

Please join with your colleagues to discover the promise of the Kuali applications. With release 2.0 completed, the Kuali Financial System is a full featured Higher Ed Financials application that is ready to be considered for implementation. Kuali Research Administration will show the basics of their first release, Proposal Development (including Grants.gov). Kuali Student will be working on the functionality that must be included in a modern, service-oriented student application. Kuali Rice will show the benefits of a shared infrastructure for core business applications.

Kuali Days V in November was sold out. We have chosen a larger venue to allow more participation during this conference. You can review the Kuali plans at www.kuali.org.

"Join us in Paris, France for the 9th Sakai Conference

The Sakai Foundation is pleased to announce that the 2008 Sakai Community Conference will be held in Paris, France. The dates will be Tuesday-Thursday, 1-3 July, with pre- and post-conference sessions and activities on Monday, 30 June and Friday, 4 July. All meetings and conference sessions will be held at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie. The ever popular Sakai technical demonstrations will take place on Wednesday evening, 2 July, at the Marriott hotel nearby."

For further information, see the conference web site at: https://sakai.educonference.com/paris/index.php

"Mark your calendar for the premier information technology event in higher education, EDUCAUSE 2008, October 28-31 in Orlando, Florida. The program 'Interaction, Ideas, Inspiration' will include preconference seminars; track and poster sessions; small group meetings; and corporate exhibits, presentations, and workshops. ... "

Source: EDUCAUSE 2008 Web Site - http://www.educause.edu/e08

Would you like to find out about Powerpoint Karaoke, or see what the partipants are planning to do at the upcoming Spring Conference - Higher Education Solutions: The Community Source Way? Check out these Conference-related blogs.

Blogspot: http://jasig2008.blogspot.com

Crowdvine: http://ja-sigspring08.crowdvine.com/

You might be interested in checking out all of the post-Summit blogs on what is affectionately referred to as "lumdev" by the Luminis developers. uPortal is at the core of SunGard's Luminis product.

http://www.lumdev.net/blog

Executive Director Jonathan Markow offers up an excellent article on JA-SIG Membership in his most recent blog. You can read it at: http://blogs.ja-sig.org/jjmarkow

Cornell University is looking for an Applications System Integrator for its Kuali Rice implementation. This position has been posted to the CU recruitment site. Interested applicants, please apply on-line. Hard copy materials are no longer accepted. See the full posting below for further information.

Job number 08343 https://cornellu.taleo.net/careersection/10164/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=126129

Located in Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University is a bold, innovative and inclusive teaching and research university of academic distinction and public service where staff, faculty, and students alike are challenged to be active citizens of the world.

Cornell University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action educator and employer.

"Reporting to the Manager of Identity Management for Enterprise Systems and Services (ESS). Responsible for the analysis, planning, design, development, implementation, and maintenance of Identity Management applications and technologies such as authentication, authorization, and directory services. Captures requirements, performs analysis, develops strategies, and designs and implements systems from a combination of Open Source, commercial, and locally written products in order to maintain, extend, and evolve Identity Management services consistent with the needs of the University. Performs application and system maintenance as needed. Investigates and resolves system outages and escalated client issues. Participates in local working groups to help develop technical and policy direction and vision, and to help assure integration with other technical groups within OIT, the University, and with peer institutions. Works with technical groups to design and develop secure, stable, and well-behaved infrastructure and operating environment, including but not limited to database, network, systems, and architecture and framework groups."

See the full posting at: http://uhr.rutgers.edu/jobpostings/aps/Detail.asp?id=08-000287

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JA-SIG Newsletter - April 2008

Archives available in the JA-SIG wiki at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Newsletter

If your institution or company has items of interest to the JA-SIG membership, please submit them via email to newsletter@ja-sig.org.

The next JA-SIG Newsletter will be published on or about May 15th, 2008. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Wednesday, May 14th, 2008.

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Newsletter - 200804 - April 2008

JA-SIG Newsletter - April 2008

1 Welcome

1.1 Editor's Message

2 Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.1.1 CAS 3.2.1 Released

2.1.2 Packaging mod_auth_cas for Linux

2.2 uPortal

2.2.1 uPortal 3.0.0-GA Released

2.2.2 Deployed uPortals Update

3 Community News

3.1 JA-SIG Releases uPortal 3.0.0-GA for Production Use

What's New in uPortal 3.0

How do I get it? What version should I use?

How to get involved

3.2 CREE report on delivering library services via a portal

3.3 CAS Contribution - UC Berkeley and Unicon

3.4 Johns Hopkins Goes 2.6.1+

4 Upcoming Events

4.1 Don't Miss Out! Register for JA-SIG TODAY!!

4.2 Kuali Days VI - Save the date!

4.3 9th Sakai Conference - Paris, France (July 1-3, 2008)

4.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 (October 28-31, 2008)

5 JA-SIG in the Blogosphere

5.1 Spring Conference

5.2 Luminis Developers Network

5.3 Jonathan's JA-SIG Weblog

6 Job Postings

6.1 Applications System Integrator (Cornell University)

6.2 Application Developer (Rutgers University)