Newsletter - 200807 - July 2008

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1 Upcoming Events
1.1 Registration Now Open for the JA-SIG Fall 2008 Unconference
1.2 Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting (October 13-16, 2008)
1.3 EDUCAUSE 2008 - Orlando, Florida (October 28-31, 2008)

2 JA-SIG Project Updates
2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 CAS 4 Roadmap Planning (Call for Participation)
2.1.2 CAS 3.2.1.1 Release and CAS 3.3-RC2 Release
2.1.3 Spring Security 2.0.3
2.1.4 phpCAS
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 uPortal Roadmap and Vision

3 Around JA-SIG
3.1 Community Profile - Chris Myers and RJ Podeschi (Millikin University)
3.2 140 Participants Attend Sixth ESUP-Portail Conference in Paris
3.3 JA-SIG Web Redesign RFP
3.4 uPortal Steering Committee
3.5 JA-SIG Election Results

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REGISTER NOW FOR THE JA-SIG FALL 2008 UNCONFERENCE at UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

Registration fee for the October 2008 JA-SIG Unconference: $175/Members, $225/Non-Members
Nightly rate at the historic Edgewater Hotel: $129
Two-and-a-half days talking, learning, teaching, planning, coding, and hanging out with your peers - and with the uPortal, CAS, Fluid, JSR-168, SpringMVC experts: Priceless!

DATES:
October 6, 2008, 9 am to October 8, 2008, noon
October 9-10, developer meetings and optional post-conference activities

PLACE:
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street, Madison, WI 53706, Front Desk: 608-262-1122

REGISTRATION FEE:
$175 - JA-SIG Members
$225 - Non-Members
(Includes Breakfast, Mon/Tue Lunch, and Snacks)
Register here:
https://www.concentra-cms.com/register/start.action?confId=34

ACCOMMODATIONS:
Edgewater Hotel, 666 Wisconsin Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53703
$129/single/night
800•922•5512 (www.theedgewater.com)
Make sure you ask for the JA-SIG room block and rate!
Hotel registration not available by web for this event.

WHAT'S AN UNCONFERENCE?

"An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance."
-Wikipedia

JA-SIG has always been about people coming together to share and learn in an open environment, and this is what an "unconference" is all about. Many attendees at last year's unconference said it was their favorite event of the year.

The October event will provide both spontaneous and planned opportunities to collaborate on community initiatives and topics.

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?

It's up to you! Ideas people are talking about so far include the following:

Lightning Talks - Volunteers talk for up to 10 minutes. Any topic goes.
Code Clinics - Bring your uPortal, portlet, or CAS code or problem and work on it with Core developers
Screencast Factory - Show off your work while a facilitator captures it to share with the community.
Designer/Developer collaborations
Strategic Planning - What should JA-SIG be focused on next year? In three years? Join the conversation.
How-to's. How-not-to's. Tips and techniques.
See a list of ideas for activities and add your own: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/BBTP

As part of the un-conference format the final schedule will be determined in real-time, interactively with the attendees.

OK, I'M INTERESTED! WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT?

If you're planning to join us, please do the following:

1. Register for the Unconference right here: https://www.concentra-cms.com/register/start.action?confId=34
2. Visit and Add your Name on the Unconference Planning Site on the JA-SIG wiki. This is a great place to indicate your interests — what you'd like to discuss, learn, share or teach: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/DRTP
3. Call the Edgewater Hotel to reserve a room: 800•922•5512 Mention the JA-SIG room block and rate
4. Make travel arrangements. Tips are available here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/wRjP

See you at the JA-SIG Unconference,
The Fall 2008 Unconference Organizers

Dates: October 13-16, 2008
Place: New Orleans, Louisiana (Sheraton New Orleans Hotel)

"The Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting provides the community an opportunity to share the latest information on timely issues and rapidly evolving areas of interest. The fall program will offer sessions that highlight innovative uses of advanced networking for research and teaching, as well as technical sessions on the development and evolution of high-performance network infrastructures in support of local to global cyberinfrastructure. Sessions will focus on initiatives and projects that explore ways in which advanced network applications, services, tools, and digital content empower and enhance the capability of research and education communities. In addition, the program will focus on the challenges of Business Continuity Planning and the progress of Health Science and Teaching and Learning/K20 initiatives. Case studies of how advanced networking has succeeded in enabling research and education, why, and what others can learn from this success are also encouraged."

Source: http://events.internet2.edu/2008/fall-mm/calls.cfm

"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

The CAS community has started CAS4 roadmap planning! A conference call will be held this Friday (July 25, 2008). The draft agenda is as follows:

1 - Direction & Requirements

Next Steps for the CAS 3.x branch
What are we looking for in a CAS4? <http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CAS/CAS+Vision+and+Roadmap>
Integration with Existing Systems
Features / Use Cases
Relationship to Existing Architecture

2 - Project Resources

How the to-do list gets done
- Implementers
- Sponsors?
- Grants?

Support
- Mailing lists
- Documentation

3 - Governance Model

Comments on/discussion of model <http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CAS/Governance+Model>

It's not too late to get in on the conference call. If you are interested in participating, let me know (benjamin dot oshrin at rutgers dot edu).

Benn Oshrin (Rutgers University)

We've released a minor point release of version 3.2.1.1 which addresses an opportunity to inject HTML into the logout page via the url parameter. You can't hijack CAS sessions or anything with it, but you can create some really interesting HTML pages which could trick your users if they're not paying attention. If you've based your logout page at your local institution off of the "example default" pages then you should update your logout page (just to be safe we also updated the "confirm view"). Thanks to Romain Bourgue for identifying this. There are no other changes in the 3.2.1.1 release.

We've also released CAS 3.3-RC2. If you've been keeping track we last left off at 3.2.2-RC1. We've made some exciting additions such as Terracotta support, Memcache Support, updated RESTful support, and a lot of minor bug fixes. Because of a change to an internal property on the tickets (changing from Atomic Boolean to boolean) and its affect on the JPATicketRegistry, we bumped up the version to 3.3.

You can download both releases from http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/downloads/

If you've haven't been keeping up with Spring Security, they've recently released their version 2.0.3. Spring Security is a Spring subproject related to authentication and authorization. It includes the most recent JASIG CAS Client for Java. If you're doing anything beyond simple authentication, we recommend you take a look at the more full-featured Spring Security which builds on the JASIG CAS Client for Java foundation. http://static.springframework.org/spring-security/site/index.html

The phpCAS team has been hard at work making phpCAS PEAR-installable, adding Single Sign Out support, and more! Check it out http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASC/phpCAS

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

We are currently working on a "Roadmap and Vision" similar to the one being developed by the CAS team. Our efforts to date can be found at:
http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/zRjP

The Roadmap includes information on current versions of uPortal (2.6 and 3.0) and yet-to-be-released versions (3.1 and 3.2).

I met Chris Myers and RJ Podeschi from Millikin University at the Portals 2008 Conference at Gettysburg College in June. Millikin is an independent, four-year university in Decatur, Illinois with approximately 2,500 students in traditional and non-traditional undergraduate and Masters degree programs.

I was impressed to hear that Chris and RJ successfully implemented uPortal at Millikin from the ground up with relatively little outside assistance. I asked them to describe how they did it, and what follows is their reply.

Jonathan Markow
JASIG Executive Director

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Honestly, the implementation was very interesting, and has been an awesome learning experience. Before we got started with implementing uPortal, Chris only had minimal experience with Linux and Tomcat, and none with Java (none of our staff had much experience with Java programming either.) Our boss made uPortal the top priority for Chris to work on, so he was able to dedicate a lot of time to the project, learning these technologies as he went along. He started out reading the documentation and trying the deployment step by step. Whenever he would find an error message or a problem, he would do research (primarily on Google and the JA-SIG website,) and would be able to resolve it, sometimes after a few minutes, sometimes after a few days. He documented everything as he went along (even the most basic commands, and about 30 websites he referenced) so that he could replicate the process exactly in the future. After about four weeks of working on it on and off, many Google searches, and a lot of answered prayers, he had an instance of uPortal 2.5 and CAS 3.1 up and running on SLES 10, Tomcat 5.5.25, and MySQL, connected to Millikin's Novell eDirectory system via LDAP and using automatic group creation with the JITLDAP plugin. It didn't do too much just yet, but it worked.

Millikin is a member of the Associated Colleges of Illinois, a collaborative group of 23 private colleges and universities across Illinois. One of the other schools in the group is the University of St. Francis in Joliet. A few staff members from Millikin were able to take a day trip up there this past December, and worked with their staff, especially Tim Archer, who had already gone through a uPortal rollout. Tim was able to help us tweak and configure uPortal to make it more robust for our environment (USF also uses Novell and GroupWise on their campus and Banner for their campus information system.) Tim had written a couple of custom Java classes for CAS and Oracle packages for, well, Oracle, that enabled us to perform single-sign on with GroupWise and some other web applications. Also, as we have progressed forward with our implementation and expansion of uPortal, whenever we have hit a roadblock we have been able to get a hold of Tim, and he has helped us find a solution to the problem.

We were able to purchase a new server to install the software on early in January once we were able to prove the functionality of uPortal. While we were undergoing this hardware migration, RJ was able to migrate the database from MySQL to Oracle so that we could leverage the data in our campus information system for the portal as well - he has developed a number of queries and reports that we can run from the portal directly against Oracle views and tables. RJ has also developed a messaging portlet for the portal that allows us to display information about system upgrades, outages, and other notices in the portal and on our department webpage, using the messaging piece built into Banner (so we only have to enter a notice once to have it show up everywhere.)

We then extended the base framework that Tim provided in order to bring more Millikin applications online and into the portal (such as Jira, Moodle, TouchNet bill payment, and Banner self-serve). We have since developed several web applications to integrate into the portal, including one that allows end users to see what printers they have available to them via Novell iPrint based on the department they work for, and to be able to install them directly from the portal. We have also developed an application called MySSO that allows a user to save their credentials (encrypted, of course) for a non-campus website once and single-sign on into it in the future. We found a Novell-developed open-source Java application for password management that we have been able to integrate into uPortal to provide remote password changes, forgotten password functionality, and policy enforcement for our users. Our incoming freshmen complete their registration for Orientation and Registration through the portal, which lets them know if they have not completed one of the prerequisites for the different parts of the process.

We went live with a soft rollout with uPortal to students in late April and faculty in May, after 6 months of implementation and development, and have continued adding new functionality as time has progressed. This fall, we will be training our incoming students how to use the portal during their technology session, which will save us approximately an hour per student in training, and will allow us to have only one password change and one place to log in, instead of the five we have currently.

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Chris Myers (CMyers at mail dot millikin dot edu) is the User Services Specialist in the Information Technology department at Millikin, where he supports the GroupWise email system, NetWare fileservers and user accounts, iPrint system, Moodle, and uPortal. Chris is also very involved in his church, where he supports the IT efforts and is a youth leader.

RJ Podeschi (rpodeschi at mail dot Millikin dot edu) is the Sr. Database Administrator in the Information Technology department at Millikin, as well as a Millikin alum. RJ supports Oracle databases, the Banner administrative system, Touchnet Payment Gateway, and Resource 25 campus scheduling system for Millikin. He is active in his church on the administrative council, and enjoys running, playing golf, and cooking.

One hundred and forty participants recently attended the "ESUP-Days" conference in Paris (June 30, 2008) organized by the ESUP-Portail consortium.

Some highlights of the conference were the following presentations:

1. The new legal structure for the consortium, effective July 2008
2. The distribution of the new version of Esup-Portail packaging with uPortal 2.6 and CAS 3.0
3. The new web-site of the consortium, which is based on the Confluence wiki
4. User-experience feedback, always an important part of these events
5. The ESUP-Helpdesk application, version 3
6. The new release of the ORI-OAI project and an example of its integration with the portal

Finally, this conference, with representatives from our entire community of 80 French universities, was an opportunity to discuss our increasing collaboration with JA-SIG.

Alain Mayeur
University of Valenciennes
http://www.esup-portail.org

JA-SIG's websites have been growing for the past seven years with essentially the same information architecture they started out with. At this stage in our evolution as an organization, we have decided to redesign our sites with the following goals in mind:

Create a new information architecture and website re-design that make it much easier for users to understand what JA-SIG is and does, for JA-SIG website maintainers to add to and edit the site's content, for users to find the information they need, and for JA-SIG to present itself to the world. Scoped deliverables will also include the following:

Enhancement of the JA-SIG brand and visual identity
Design and development of new logos
Adoption of new content management system that simplifies site maintenance
Improved information architecture that will optimally organize existing content and provide for new content that will help achieve the goals of this project.

Following a recent open requirements process, we have drafted an RFP for this work, and we invite vendors to submit proposals prior to August 10th. The RFP, "JA-SIG Web Redesign RFP Final.pdf" may be found on the following JA-SIG wiki page: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/pages/viewpageattachments.action?pageId=8716350

We will be asking for feedback on various design options during the summer. To participate in this process, subscribe to the
jasig-webpresence working group list: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/SoBO.

Thank you,

Jonathan Markow
Executive Director

The uPortal steering committee is excited to see the JASIG web presence re-implementation RFP released, having worked to define the uPortal aspects of that RFP and looking forward to working with the successful respondent to improve the uPortal website. While that effort will more generally update the website, the committee most recently has been specifically looking at the CAS project roadmap page and effort with jealousy and is working to implement a similar roadmap page and effort for uPortal. While uPortal's issue tracker already presents a technical roadmap, you can look forward to there soon being available a more articulate roadmap page as well.

Andrew Petro
uPortal project steering committee

The JA-SIG Elections Committee is pleased to announce the results of the 2008 JA-SIG elections. Member organizations were asked to select five positions on the JA-SIG Board of Directors.

Joining the Board of Directors are Benn Oshrin of Rutgers University, John Lewis of Unicon, Katya Sadovsky of UC Irvine and Robert Sherratt of University of Hull. Barry Walsh, of Indiana University, was re-elected to the board for another term.

These positions become official on September 1, 2008.

The JA-SIG Elections Committee extends thanks to all who participated in the nomination and election.

Carl Jacobson - University of Delaware, Chair
Dave Koehler - Cornell University
Deb Smith - CONCENTRA-CMS, JA-SIG Administrator

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JA-SIG Newsletter - July 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 at ja-sig dot org.

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

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