Newsletter - 201109 - September 2011

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"Save the Date" - Jasig Unconference - Shrewsbury, Massachusetts (November 7-9, 2011)
Jasig Election Results (as announced in August)

Central Authentication Service (CAS)

CAS Server 3.4.9 and CAS Server 3.4.10

uPortal

uPortal 4.0 Now Available!
Update Your "Deployed uPortal"
uPortal Documentation

Bedework

Bedework Project News
Bedework 3.8 Milestone 1 Release Now Available

uMobile

uMobile 1.0 GA Released!

Sakai Connector Portlet 1.3 release
Announcing General Availability of the Jasig Scheduling Assistant

Shibboleth Installation Training (Nov. 7-8, 2011)
Kuali Days 2011 - Empowering the Community (November 14-16, 2011)

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Save the Date for a Jasig TRUE Unconference!

The Jasig Board of Directors is aware of the challenge of holding our valuable annual unconference during times of reduced travel budgets. Our response is an opportunity to meet and collaborate with relatively little cost to you.

Dates: Unconference Sessions, November 7-9th, 2011 and Developer Meetings, November 10-11th, 2011.

Place: UMassOnline Offices, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. This campus is approximately one to one and a half hours from Boston’s Logan Airport, near Worcester, MA. We will make an attendee list available on the wiki so people can possibly coordinate sharing rental cars.

Content: Help us make this the best unconference ever by joining the logistics planning group. If you’re interested, contact Patty at ED@jasig.org .

Conference fee: FREE.

Hotel: We will reserve a block of rooms at the DoubleTree Westborough (6 miles from the meeting) at the special rate of 119.00, including wireless. Please send me an indication of whether you’re coming ASAP so I can adjust the block appropriately.

Meals: UMassOnline will offer a lunch deal for a reasonable price (5.00 for a bag lunch). Some hotels include breakfast. Since this is a true unconference, you are on your own for meals, but we will make suggestions.

Please Note: This is a pay-as-you-go informal unconference, which allows us to eliminate the conference fee entirely. We believe the primary value of this meeting is the opportunity to work together, and we are facilitating that.

To Sign Up: Please send your name, email address, institution, a phone number, and what days you’ll attend to Patty Gertz at ED@jasig.org. We will soon have an unconference wiki where Patty will post attendee and meeting information.

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

Jasig has always been about people coming together to share and learn in an open environment, and this is what an "unconference" is all about.

This fall event will provide both spontaneous and planned opportunities to collaborate on all Jasig community initiatives as well as initiatives from other community open source projects.

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 8 minutes. Any topic goes.
Workshops - Bring your uPortal, portlet, CAS, Bedework, or IdM code or design or requirements and work on them with core developers.
Birds of a Feather Sessions - Discuss common interests, issues, problems with colleagues.

Strategic Planning - What impact will the merger with Sakai have on Jasig? Where should this new organization be in one year? In three years? Join the conversation.

Newbie? Meet the experts and get individualized help.
How-to's. How-not-to's. Tips and techniques.

The final schedule will be determined in real-time, interactively with the attendees.

Questions? Send email to Patty Gertz at ED at jasig.org

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(as announced in August)

Thank you to everyone who participated and voted in Jasig's annual Board and Steering Committee elections. Congratulations to our newly elected members:

Board of Directors (http://www.jasig.org/jasig-governance):

John Lewis, Unicon
Benn Oshrin
Robert Sherratt, University of Hull

CAS Steering Committee (http://www.jasig.org/cas/steering-committee):

Brian Savage, Boston College

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the following members for their outstanding service as they retire from their respective positions:

Katya Sadovsky, University of California, Irvine, Board of Directors
Andrew Petro, Unicon, CAS Steering Committee
Erik Ollson, University of California, Irvine, uPortal Steering Committee

I very much look forward to working with our renewed board and steering committees over the coming year.

Jens Haeusser
Chair, Jasig Board of Directors

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Dear CAS Community,

We're pleased to announce both CAS Server 3.4.9 and CAS Server 3.4.10. Though both have been released, please use 3.4.10, as it fixes a minor configuration regression related to LDAP authentication handlers.

Complete changelog:

CAS-1003 Provide a TicketGrantingTicket expiration policy that incorporates both a hard timeout and sliding window idle timeout
CAS-1034 Update vt-crypt to 2.1.4 for Fixes Related to X.509 DN Parsing
CAS-1030 FastBindLdapAuthenticationHandler spring config fails without ldapTemplate which is required, but isn't used
CAS-1028 Russian translation
CAS-1027 Update aspectj-maven-plugin in the core pom from 1.3 to 1.3.1
CAS-958 Cas Login Token Ids don't conform to Protocol Specification
CAS-972 CAS TGC default cookie path should be "/cas/" ?
CAS-988 Generate Hashes for Assembly Artifacts
CAS-949 Missing namespace breaks SamlService functionality
CAS-973 Remember me support through SAML validation
CAS-981 Remove final on AbstractLdapUsernamePasswordAuthenticationHandler.afterPropertiesSet()
CAS-931 spanish languaje improve
CAS-975 500 ISE while attempting to validate an invalid service ticket
CAS-1014 CAS login view layout is broken
CAS-964 InMemoryServiceRegistryDaoImpl incorrectly register services
CAS-971 Incomplete translation file crashes admin interface
CAS-987 Permit use of LDAP connections pool in AbstractLdapPersonDirectoryCredentialsToPrincipalResolver and AbstractLdapUsernamePasswordAuthenticationHandler
CAS-1001 TicketOrCredentialPrincipalResolver results in ClassCastException when implementing own UserDetails implementation
CAS-1018 address "//XXX fix this" in CentralAuthenticationServiceImpl
CAS-1015 jQuery object is undefined on CAS login page
CAS-998 Improve the rendering performance of the default login page
CAS-991 add user-facing note to login JSP reminding that SSO will not work without https:
CAS-976 Add/Edit Service UI Service URL property should be labeled "Service URL" not "Service Url"
CAS-990 cas-server-webapp web.xml SVN tag 3.4.5 declares display-name version 3.4.4
CAS-982 Abstract $ { cas.host.name } as a cas.properties property

You can find the releases in the Maven Repository or http://downloads.jasig.org/cas/

Thanks to everyone who helped out with this release.

Cheers,
Scott

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Jasig is proud to announce the release of uPortal 4.0, the latest version of the leading portal framework developed by and for Higher Education! uPortal is a powerful, flexible, scalable, standards based open source enterprise integration portal platform enabling personalization, customization, and integration. This major release supports version 2.0 of the Portlet specification (JSR-286), includes new customization, groups, permissions and user management UIs. 'Under the hood' improvements in the rendering pipeline and caching improve speed and memory usage of the portal. uPortal is a built by Higher Education for Higher Education.

uPortal 4, including a quick-start distribution, is available for download at http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download/uportal-400. Features, benefits and support information is available at http://www.uportal.org.

What's new in uPortal 4.0

Portlet 2.0 Support

uPortal 4 supports Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286), implementing inter-portlet communication via events, resource URLs for AJAX, and the other requirements of the specification. This means that adopters can build custom portlets using the latest portlet development techniques and frameworks, including the latest Spring Portlet MVC and Spring Web Flow releases (and thereby take advantage of Spring 3). This is a tremendous step forward in the portlet development APIs afforded to adopters.

Google Gadgets support

uPortal 4 also ships demonstrating inclusion of Google Gadgets in the portal, affording an API totally different from JSR-286 for developing custom portal-delivered experiences.

UI Improvements

uPortal 4 ships with improved out of the box user experiences for layout management and administration, and provides a better starting point for custom skin development.

Mobile Support

uPortal 4 ships delivering traditional desktop browser as well as mobile browser appropriate markup with jQuery Mobile support. uPortal 4 also supports the optional free and open source uMobile native mobile applications. This makes uPortal 4 a viable platform for delivering mobile browser experiences out of the box, and provides a path to even richer native mobile application experiences.

Internationalization

uMobile 4 ships with a new unified message file approach to internationalization support and improved i18n support throughout.

Integration

uPortal has long offered flexible and pluggable groups service, and now ships with support for using Grouper groups within uPortal. uPortal has long offered excellent CAS support, including support for using CAS proxy tickets in portlets, and now ships demonstrating this, as well as integration with the ClearPass CAS extension providing optional support for making the end user password available to portlets concurrently with use of CAS. Portlet Event based searching allows any portlet to contribute search results to the uPortal Search dialog.

Data Import/Export

uPortal 4 provides improved data import/export formats, definitions, and improved support for executing on these imports and exports.

Administrative Tools

uPortal 4 ships with improved administrative tools supporting delegated administration of groups and permissions, as well as management of portal-local users.

Performance (and flexibility)

A refactored rendering pipeline affords greater modularity and flexibility, but uPortal 4 demonstrates the potential in this out of the box by leveraging that flexibility to provide better-performing smarter-caching implementations of rendering pipeline components. uPortal 4 is faster and better under the hood.

Portlet Execution Management

uPortal 4 doesn't just support the latest portlet APIs, it provides great support for these APIs, with an execution environment that provides helpful debugging information when portlets time out or fail and which cleans up after portlets even when they won't clean up after themselves. This makes uPortal 4 a more supportive development environment and platform for delivering your custom portlets.

For more information the features and benefits of uPortal, see http://www.uportal.org.

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

https://wiki.jasig.org/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, you are highly encouraged to add your own entry.

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Hope you had a great summer! With all the excitement of the new uPortal 4 release, I want to go ahead and start gathering thoughts and content for the new uPortal 4 manual. Many of you have already been sending me feedback. I really appreciate it and the entire uPortal community appreciates it too! So keep it coming.

This month I have been seeking information for the following topics: Databases and Authentication
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/Configure+the+Database
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/Authentication

If you have found some information in the uPortal 4 manual that needs to be updated on these subjects, please send it my way.

What I am also looking for:
Proofreaders: Spot any grammatical errors, spelling errors, or a file path is incorrect?
New Content: Is there new content that may be helpful regarding databases or authentication that our community would benefit from?
We would love to hear from you.

You can send your feedback to the uportal-user mailing list, or send it directly to me (mccordl@southwestern.edu).

Thank you,
Laura McCord, uPortal Documentation Coordinator

P.S. I take uPortal 3.2 manual corrections too

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Bedework Steering Committee - You say Goodbye and I say Hello

I would like to bring everyone up-to-date on changes to the Bedework Steering Committee.

Mimi Mugler of the University of California at Berkeley, and Juan Cruz Ruiz de Gauna of the Universidad Pública de Navarra have both left the Bedework Steering Committee due to organizational changes at their respective universities.

On behalf of the Bedework Steering Committee, and the entire Bedework community, I thank them for their contributions to Bedework. On a more personal note, it has been my absolute pleasure to know both Mimi and Juan, and I am very fortunate to count them among the friends I have made through my involvement with Bedework.

As we say au revoir to Mimi and Juan, we also welcome Carlos Alonso Vega of the Universidad Pública de Navarra. Carlos is a colleague of Juan's, and has been an active participant in the Bedework project since the very early days of Bedework.

Oh to be in Prague in October

Unfortunately, I will not be in Prague, but the week of October 3-7, but Mike Douglass will, attending CalConnect XXII, the member meeting, in Prague, the Czech Republic. This will be the first full CalConnect event in Europe, featuring an Interoperability Test Event, a Technical Conference, plus additional workshops and seminars. CalConnect is offering a one-time, very reduced registration fee for non-members to participate in both the IOP Test Event and the Roundtable Technical Conference.

At this event, we will be interoperability testing Bedework with a number of CalDAV clients. Additionally, we hope to test CardDAV (address book), the timezones service for compatibility with the draft specification and with other servers both as primary and secondary services, and we hope to test some aspects of the new CalWS SOAP and RESTful services, as well as the correctness of the XML representations. At the member meeting, Mike be giving presentations in his role as chair of the XML, Timezone, and Freebusy committees, and as a participant in the Eventpub committee. And finally, Mike anticipates demo-ing the Jasig Scheduling Assistant with Bedework.

If you are interested in calendaring, would like to participate in the interoperability testing or the technical seminars, but have found traveling to North America too time-consuming or expensive, don't miss out on this opportunity to participate in a CalConnect meeting, and to talk Bedework and calendaring with Mike.

For additional information, see http://calconnect.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/calconnect-is-coming-to-europe/
and http://www.calconnect.org/calconnect22.shtml

Oh to be in Philadelphia in October

Although I will not be enjoying Prague in October, I will be enjoying Philadelphia, PA while I am attending EDUCAUSE 2011 from October 17 - 21. Although there are many jokes about Philadelphia, it is one of my favorite cities, having lived in that area during my pre-Bedework career.

For the first time in a very long time, I will be presenting on a topic other than Bedework. On Thurs, Oct 20, in the coveted 8:00 AM slot, I will be speaking about our MorningMail project.

If you are attending EDUCAUSE and would like to talk about Bedework, calendaring, or MorningMail, just let me know.

Oh to be in Shrewsbury in November

The Jasig 2011 Unconference will be held November 7-9th, 2011, followed by Developer Meetings, the 10-11th, at UMassOnline Offices, Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. This campus is about 1.5 hours from Boston's Logan Airport, near Worcester, MA. This is a pay-as-you-go informal Unconference, allowing Jasig to eliminate the conference fee entirely. 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 in advance.

The wiki page for this fall's event can be found at
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JCON/Fall+2011+Unconference+-+Shrewsbury+-+UMassOnline

and you can also check out the site for last year's Unconference
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JCON/Fall+2010+Unconference+-+Joliet+-+University+of+St.+Francis

Bedework developers have attended the Jasig Unconference the last few years, and we anticipate attending this one as well.

Gary Schwartz

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A first Bedework 3.8 milestone release is available at:
http://www.jasig.org/bedework/download

This milestone release represents a technical preview, not a production release, of Bedework 3.8 - there are some bugs and some still incomplete functionality. However, this milestone represents an opportunity to explore some of the new functionality and improvements which will be present in the 3.8 production release.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this milestone release is that it has been tested with, and supports, the soon-to-be-released Jasig Scheduling Assistant.
http://www.jasig.org/node/799

We have been very excited by this application since we first saw it in 2008 at the Jasig Unconference at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). At that time it was a good app built atop Oracle calendar. Today it is a very impressive office hours app, which can be deployed with CalDAV calendar servers such as Bedework. We have been supporting Nick Blair, the lead developer of the Scheduling Assistant, in his efforts to transform the code to an open source, CalDAV-capable Jasig incubator project. We anticipate that the Scheduling Assistant will have its first production release very shortly.

Information about the Jasig Scheduling Assistant project is available at
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/SA/Home

and, Bedework-specific deployment information can be found at
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/SA/Deploying+the+Scheduling+Assistant+-+Bedework

We are very excited by the other features and enhancements in Bedework 3.8.

This milestone release includes

Bug fixes
Hypersonic (HSQL) is now packaged with the Quickstart instead of Derby. Derby never met our expectations that it could be deployed as the production DBMS for Bedework, and the advantages of HSQL, including Quickstart support for the Scheduling Assistant, are compelling.
Structural changes to projects

We anticipate that the release schedule for Bedework 3.8 will include a

Milestone 2 release
Release Candidate 1 (RC1) will provide a preview of the generalized file synchronization service based on CalWS-SOAP. This service provides greatly improved performance for external subscriptions, and will underpin Exchange synchronization.
RC2 as necessary
Bedework 3.8 Production, which will include:
- Packaging with JBoss 7
- restore modifications to convert external subscriptions to the new generalized file synchronization service
- Web client enhancements & bug fixes, including a more robust Bedework Address Book, which can be used to access any CardDAV (v4) server.

Please take a look at this Bedework 3.8 milestone release, and also the Jasig Scheduling Assistant when it becomes available - we think you will be as impressed as we have been.

On behalf of the Bedework Steering Committee,
Gary Schwartz

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Jasig is excited to announce the first general audience release of the uMobile platform. uMobile provides an enterprise framework distributing personalized, role-based content in a mobile environment. The platform consists of 1) a server application providing a Web-based experience optimized for recent smartphone and tablet browsers and 2) optional native apps for iOS™ (iPhone™, iPod Touch™, and iPad™) and Android™ devices.

A uMobile quickstart download is available at http://www.jasig.org/umobile/download. More information about uMobile, including information on engaging with the community, can be found at http://www.jasig.org/umobile, with a dozen screen shots available at http://www.jasig.org/umobile/see-it.

Features

uMobile is built atop a sophisticated and mature portal framework, enabling distribution of relevant role-based content to campus communities, such as students, faculty, alumni, while an unauthenticated guest mode targets prospective students and campus visitors. Persistent authentication and SSO integration allows users to conveniently access personalized information, as well as save individual preferences. uMobile's administrative toolset provides delegated administration capabilities, content creation tools, and debugging and monitoring resources.

uMobile's out of the box modules include:

Calendar
News (RSS/Atom)
Video
Directory
Search
Maps

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I am very pleased to announce the 1.3 release of the Sakai Connector Portlet. This portlet implements the IMS Basic LTI specification and allows a user to render any tool from a Sakai environment, as a full featured application within uPortal.

The portlet is completely user configurable – users can choose from what site and what tool they want to render. Administrators can restrict the rendering of certain tools as desired.

This release brings a number of new features including the CONFIG portlet mode for administrators to set the configuration at runtime.

More information including a comprehensive installation guide, screenshots and a video are available here:

https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Sakai+Connector+Portlet

Regards,
Steve Swinsburg

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We are pleased to announce immediate availability of the first release of the Jasig Scheduling Assistant. I apologize for cross posting to both lists; future Scheduling Assistant announcements will be published on just the sched-assist-user list.

The Scheduling Assistant is a partner application to be deployed with Enterprise Calendar servers to enhance scheduling capabilities of the Calendar server. A full list of features can be viewed at:

https://wiki.jasig.org/display/SA/Scheduling+Assistant+Features

This release for the Scheduling Assistant has support for 3 known Calendar Servers:

Bedework
Oracle Communications Unified Communications Suite
Oracle Calendar

The first 2 servers leverage the CalDAV protocol for event creation and manipulation, the latter depends on a proprietary native library provided by Oracle.

There are other Calendar Servers (like Zimbra) that will likely work with the Scheduling Assistant; we are very interested in working with volunteers to help investigate further compatibility.

Project Home:

https://wiki.jasig.org/display/SA/Home

Screen-shot Tour:

https://wiki.jasig.org/display/SA/Scheduling+Assistant+Screenshot+Tour

The Scheduling Assistant is very easy to deploy, only requiring changes to a single property file to get integrated with your Calendar Server. The text displayed by the Scheduling Assistant can be translated to other languages quickly as well.

If you'd like to try it out, please follow the Getting Started instructions on the Scheduling Assistant wiki. If you have any questions or are interested in development or trying it out with other Calendar Servers, the following mailing lists are available:

sched-assist-user@lists.jasig.org
Subscribe: https://lists.wisc.edu/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=sched-assist-user

sched-assist-dev@lists.jasig.org
Subscribe: https://lists.wisc.edu/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=sched-assist-dev

Thanks!
Nicholas Blair

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InCommon, the California State University, and the California Community College system are sponsoring Shibboleth installation training nov 7-8. Here are the details.

SHIBBOLETH WORKSHOP SERIES

Identity Provider * November 7, 2011 * 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. (PT)
Service Provider * November 8, 2011 * 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. (PT)

The California State University Chancellor’s Office * Long Beach, CA
www.incommon.org/educate/shibboleth/

Register now for the Shibboleth Workshop Series, November 7-8, 2011, at the California State University Chancellor’s Office in Long Beach, Calif.

Have you decided to deploy a web single sign-on (SSO) system and leverage it to access resources and contracted services through InCommon? Do you need training on installation and support?

Consider attending one or both:

Shibboleth Identity Provider Workshop on November 7, 2011
Shibboleth Service Provider Workshop on November 8, 2011

The InCommon Shibboleth Identity and Service Provider Workshops will provide attendees with technical installation and configuration experience with Shibboleth Single Sign-on and Federating Software, version 2.

Developed for organizations new to Shibboleth and those with existing implementations interested in upgrading to the v2 release, the workshops will offer attendees the chance to:
Install either a prototype Shibboleth identity or service provider in a virtual machine environment.
Hear tips for configuring and running the software in production.
Learn about integration with LDAP directories and selected packages.
AUDIENCE includes higher education and partner organization representatives with knowledge of identity management concepts and related implementation experience. Organizations are encouraged to send one or two attendees who best represent the following functions:

System install, integration, and ongoing support staff
Campus technology architects

REGISTER SOON (http://www.incommon.org/educate/shibboleth/registration.html) to reserve a seat. Participation is limited to maintain program quality. For those staying overnight, there is a list of hotels on the workshop website (www.incommon.org/educate/shibboleth). NOTE: There is a separate registration process and fee for each workshop (IdP and SP). If you wish to attend both days, be sure to register for each.

RESOURCES: To learn more about Shibboleth, see shibboleth.internet2.edu. More information on federated identity can be found at www.incommon.org.

THIS SHIBBOLETH WORKSHOP SERIES event is sponsored by InCommon, Internet2, the California Community College system, and the California State University.

Dean Woodbeck
Program Manager, InCommon
woodbeck at internet2.edu

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"Save the Date! Kuali Days 2011 will take place November 14-16, 2011 at the new JW Marriott in beautiful downtown Indianapolis. Kuali Days is the annual Kuali conference where current and potential members meet to share information with the community at large. The conference is designed for all levels of interest, so if you’re new to the community or a long-time member, mark your calendar now and plan to join us! Teams from all seven projects including the Kuali Financial System, Kuali Coeus, Kuali Student, Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE), Kuali Ready, Kuali People Management for the Enterprise, and Kuali Rice will be there in full force."

For further details, visit the Kuali Days 2011 web site at:http://kuali.org/kuali-days-2011

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Editor: Mark Rogers (University of Manitoba)

Online edition at: http://www.jasig.org/jasig-newsletters/september-2011

Past editions of the Jasig Newsletter can also be found in the Jasig wiki at: https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JSG/Newsletter

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JASIG NEWSLETTER - SEPTEMBER 2011

JASIG ANNOUNCEMENTS

JASIG PROJECTS

JASIG INCUBATOR

AROUND JASIG

JASIG ANNOUNCEMENTS

"Save the Date" - Jasig Unconference - Shrewsbury, Massachusetts (November 7-9, 2011)

Jasig Election Results

JASIG PROJECTS

Central Authentication Service (CAS)

CAS Server 3.4.9 and CAS Server 3.4.10

uPortal

uPortal 4.0 Now Available!

Update Your "Deployed uPortal"

uPortal Documentation

Bedework

Bedework Project News

Bedework 3.8 Milestone 1 Release Now Available

uMobile

uMobile 1.0 GA Released!

JASIG INCUBATOR

Sakai Connector Portlet 1.3 release

Announcing General Availability of the Jasig Scheduling Assistant

AROUND JASIG

Shibboleth Installation Training (November 7-8, 2011)

Kuali Days 2011 - Empowering the Community (November 14-16, 2011)

Jasig Newsletter - September 2011