Newsletter - 200707 - July 2007

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JA-SIG Newsletter - July 2007
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1 Welcome
1.1 Editor's Message

2 Call for Volunteers
2.1 uPortal Documentation Coordinator

3 Project Updates
3.1 CAS
3.2 uPortal

4 Community News
4.1 JA-SIG's uPortal Receives Prestigious EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award
4.2 Project investigating libraries and institutional portals
4.3 Deployed uPortals Update
4.4 SunGard Higher Education Luminis Platform Portal Strategy

5 From the Lists
5.1 uPortal: Just a portal, you say?

6 Job Posting
6.1 Unicon - Web Developer

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1 Welcome

1.1 Editor's Message

Welcome to the July 2007 issue of the JA-SIG Newsletter. It is my first one, having taken on the responsibilities formerly held by Jason Shao (Rutgers University).

My name is Mark Rogers. I'm employed at the University of Manitoba as a member of the Application Technologies Group. Our group takes care of the infrastructure supporting our Application Development and Delivery teams. We have deployed both Banner and Luminis from SunGard Higher Education at our school.

Currently, I am enjoying the latter portion of a one year leave of absence from work. I'll be returning to work in September, but, until then, will just continue to have fun with my six year old daughter. And I'll be trying to produce the monthly JA-SIG Newsletter, of course.

Special thanks go out Jonathan Markow, Jason Shao, and Andrew Petro for helping me in various ways with this first issue.

Enjoy!
Mark Rogers, Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

2 Call for Volunteers

2.1 uPortal Documentation Coordinator

From time to time we ask folks to volunteer for a support role that fills a specific need within our community. Today we are seeking people with writing skills to volunteer for the role of uPortal Documentation Coordinator. This person will help undertake a new initiative to improve uPortal documentation on the web by aggregating, organizing, editing, and adding to the host of information that is spread throughout our wiki and mail lists. The goal would be to create excellent documentation for new portal users and to provide a helpful reference for all.

Responsibilities include:

  • Point of contact for collaboration on documentation, brokering worthwhile documentation initiatives
  • Cheerleader for documentation, encouraging participants to document and guiding towards productive and useful documentation approaches
  • Contributes to and organizes portions of uPortal documentation
  • Editor in Chief of uPortal portions of the JA-SIG wiki, with particular responsibility for encouraging good organization and usability alongside inclusiveness
  • Reports regularly to the uPortal Framework Coordinator on the state of documentation efforts

3 Project Updates

3.1 CAS

JA-SIG CAS recently released the lastest release candidate for its CAS Server 3.1 and is marching towards a final release. Updates in the latest release candidate include improved support for Google Accounts, support for JA-SIG PersonDirectory, numerous bug fixes and tweaks!

If you missed the recent JA-SIG Conference, you missed out on a lot of excellent content, especially for CAS deployers. Lucky for you, most of the presentations have been posted online:

Finally, the CAS project is continuing to look for people to help update their User Manual. If you've got a few minutes, and you've deployed CAS, consider taking a look at our User Manual and adding/updating any entries:

http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASUM/Home

Contributed by:
Scott Battaglia (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, JA-SIG Central Authentication Service

3.2 uPortal

Since the previous newsletter, the uPortal 2.6 release process has continued, delivering release candidates one and two of the prospective 2.6.0 release, also available for download from the uPortal downloads page. Release candidates have included continued enhancements and corrections to the new drag and drop user preferences available for default theme, thanks to the continued work of Jen Bourey of Yale University.

Also since the previous newsletter, the uPortal project has addressed a critical security vulnerability in RemoteUserSecurityContext by releasing a security patch release uPortal 2.5.3.1, thanks especially to the work of Eric Dalquist of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and of Bill Thompson, JA-SIG board member and uPortal project liaison.

At the Denver JA-SIG conference, there were a number of presentations about and related to uPortal, including pre-conference seminars on DLM and on implementing uPortal, and presentations on Duke University's revitalized uPortal 2.5.3 deployment, uPortal 2.6 release, comparing IChannel and JSR-168, web proxies, use of AJAX to improve the uPortal user experience, compelling news aggregation, Pearson Publishing's large-scale uPortal project, DLM, and Shibbolized uPortal.

Several conference presentations related to the FLUID project, which will be working with uPortal in the near term to improve user experience and adopt more compelling user interface components. It is not too early to get involved in these exciting efforts.

At the conference, Matt Young of Duke University announced the availability of JSR-168 portlets from the Duke uPortal project as open source portlets, including a Facebook integration portlet, an email portlet, and a tabbed RSS consumption portlet. This was just one (particularly well-presented) example of interesting higher-ed-developed JSR-168 portlets shown and discussed at JA-SIG Denver.

Contributed by:
Andrew Petro (Unicon, Inc.), uPortal Release Engineer

4 Community News

4.1 JA-SIG's uPortal Receives Prestigious EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award

JA-SIG's uPortal Receives Prestigious EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award for Innovation and Initiatives in Higher Education

Open Source Organization Sets Industry Standard for Groundbreaking Technological Solutions, Market Adoption, and Community Participation

Princeton , NJ - June 25, 2007 - JA-SIG, the non-profit organization responsible for the uPortal community source enterprise portal, today announced that uPortal has received the prestigious EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award for its innovations and initiatives centered on information technologies that provide groundbreaking solutions to major challenges in higher education. uPortal is the leading open source enterprise portal framework built by and for the higher education community. uPortal continues to evolve through contributions from its global community and is supported by resources, grants, donations, and memberships fees from academic institutions, commercial affiliates, and non-profit foundations. Membership information can be found at: http://www.ja-sig.org/membership and the uPortal software can be downloaded at: http://www.uportal.org/download.html.

"It is an honor for uPortal to be recognized and receive the EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award. This award is particularly meaningful because it reflects the robust health and size of our community, as well as the maturity of the uPortal platform." stated Jonathan Markow, Chairman of JA-SIG, the non-profit organization responsible for uPortal. "We are extremely appreciative to all of our active and participating member organizations, commercial affiliates, and contributors from around the world that have made uPortal the success it is today."

Excerpts from EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award Description for uPortal

"The uPortal project is arguably the most successful portal framework in higher education, with hundreds of active installations and over 650 commercial licenses sold."

"uPortal helped provide legitimacy to the approach before it became clear that portals represent the electronic equivalent of a "one-stop shop" that has led to many service improvements across our institutions."

"The uPortal project is an exemplar of community source in higher education, demonstrating that by working together in a structured, managed way, using open standards, and designing for generic flexible use, we can create applications tailored to higher education and make them available at a cost that lowers barriers to even the smaller institutions. It has been an inspiration for many important projects that are now maturing, including Sakai, OSP, Kuali, and others."

Recipients of the EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award are selected by the EDUCAUSE Recognition Committee.

About EDUCAUSE

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The current membership comprises more than 2,100 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 200 corporations, with 16,500 active members. EDUCAUSE has offices in Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at www.educause.edu.

4.2 Project investigating libraries and institutional portals

The CREE (Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment) Project was originally funded by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from 2004 to 2005. It investigated the value of presenting Internet search tools within local environments, including an institutional portal, rather than simply linking to these elsewhere on the web. A demonstrator using JSR 168 portlets was built for user testing within the project, which successfully showed that local presentation of search services was welcomed by users, not least as a valuable means of raising awareness of resources and encouraging their use.

The CREE Extension Project has now been funded to July 2008. This will be pursuing outstanding issues from the original CREE Project, and focusing around the presentation and delivery of library-related services and content within an institutional portal. A stakeholder workshop has been held to inform development, and portlet development to address issues of advanced search, results display, alerting, and location and delivery of resources is currently being scoped.

Further information on the project, and all outputs from the original funding, can be found at http://www.hull.ac.uk/cree/

Chris Awre, CREE Project Manager, c.awre@hull.ac.uk

4.3 Deployed uPortals Update

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

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

This is a tremendous help to others either looking to adopt or scale their own implementation and only takes a few minutes of your time. If you already have an entry, please take a moment to make sure it is up to date, and consider adding a contact so folks can reach out to you directly.

If you are not yet listed and have an implementation, including a prototype or a packaged implementation like SunGard Luminus or Unicon Academus, you are highly encouraged to add your own entry.

Cheers,
Bill Thompson, JA-SIG uPortal Board Liaison

4.4 SunGard Higher Education Luminis Platform Portal Strategy

Luminis Platform is a key SunGard HE component and will continue to be an important enabling technology and strategic offering for the company. During Summit 2007, SunGard Higher Education announced plans to extend its Luminis Platform offering to provide options at the portal server layer. Luminis Platform has always focused on providing interoperability where appropriate. The message at Summit was in support of continuing this trend by offering portal engine choice and flexibility through support for both the uPortal framework and the Oracle Portal Server.

In addition to the regular feedback received in favor of open source technology and the dynamic and value the open-source community offers to higher education, SunGard HE also receives feedback around the need to reduce the complexity and the number of foundational technical components in the overall SunGard HE UDC solution set. As the SunGard HE solutions add more value as a whole, clients have asked for more uniformity in administration and management and overall technology stack alignment. We've taken this feedback and decided to look to parts of the Oracle technology stack to serve this need as it makes sense on a number of fronts including:

  • Creates further synergy with existing use of Oracle technology across the SunGard HE products
  • Many SunGard HE clients already have full-use license to Oracle stack which includes the Oracle Portal Server technologies. SunGard HE has yet to do anything to help these clients leverage that technology base.

This strategy is currently slated for the 2009 timeframe. It will result in two Luminis Platform options - one utilizing uPortal framework and one utilizing Oracle Portal Server technologies – and will allow SunGard HE to better meet the needs of clients by providing greater choice and flexibility.

As of Q1 2007, the existing Luminis Platform solution that is based on the uPortal open-source framework has been adopted by over 650 clients worldwide. This growth is expected to accelerate over the next several years. The latest version, Luminis Platform IV, is expected to contribute significantly to this growth. The uPortal based Luminis Platform solution will continue to be developed and maintained in support of this growth. This initiative simply provides a technology option for Luminis Platform where clients can select to have it run on uPortal or Oracle Portal technologies.

Contributed by:
Joshua W. Horner, Sr. Product Manager, SunGard Higher Education Solutions

5 From the Lists

5.1 uPortal: Just a portal, you say?

Yes, uPortal is free and open-source, and certainly could be used outside of a higher education context. However, uPortal is in fact much more more than "just" a portal.

uPortal is built for and by higher education, which means that the feature set and overall direction is tightly coupled with the needs and focus of higher education. No other Enterprise Portal Framework can claim this, open source or otherwise.

uPortal is also a large international community of contributors, implementors, and commercial partners. The uPortal community and its ongoing relationships both internally and with like minded communities such as Sakai, Kauli, and Fluid is also unique to uPortal.

Finally, uPortal direction is guided and supported by the membership of JASIG, a non-profit corporation, whose mission includes providing education and research in the applied use of open technology architectures and systems in higher education.

Indeed, uPortal is much more than "just" a portal.

Contributed on the uportal-user discussion list by: Bill Thompson, JA-SIG uPortal Board Liaison

6 Job Posting

6.1 Unicon - Web Developer

Unicon is looking to add a Web Developer to their team. Listing: http://www.unicon.net/company_1201.html

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JA-SIG Newsletter - July 2007

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. Please include a subject line containing: NEWSLETTER-CONTRIBUTION with any contributions.

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