u Portal An OpenSource Higher Education Web Portal

u. Portal: An Open-Source, Higher Education Web Portal Justin Tilton, Chief Executive Officer instructional media + magic, inc. at The Educational Technology Standards Workshop UC Berkeley, July 31, 2002

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Overview • • Portals Student Expectations JA-SIG What is u. Portal? Architecture of u. Portal Customization Content Web Services

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG The aggregation game…

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Some Commercial Portals • • • Sun Microsystems (i. Planet) Epicentric (Foundation Server) Oracle (Application Server Portal) IBM (Web. Sphere Portal/Jetspeed) Computer Associates (Jasmine ii) Microsoft (Share. Point Portal Server) Sequoia (XML Portal Server) People. Soft (People. Soft Portal) Citrix (XPS) Sybase (Enterprise Portal)

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Common goals/different technologies • • • System Integration & Consistency Single Sign-on & Security Personalization Collaboration Component Reuse Task Management & Workflow Internationalization Customer Relationship Management Syndicated Content Subscription

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Higher Education • Most of these features apply to Higher Education • u. Portal is bridging the gap between corporate portals and the needs of Higher Education Institutions

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG The higher education web world Research Library Administration Instruction

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Students expectations shaped by. . . • Their experience applying for admissions and financial aid • Their use of financial services portals • Their use of the Internet • Their life in a “real-time, information rich” environment

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Students now expect. . . • Customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week • Complete information from a single source • Information by Web, e-mail, telephone, facsimile, and wireless devices • response time of 15 seconds for telephone, 10 seconds for Web, and 2 hours for e-mail and facsimile • access to a complete customer history

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Students prefer • Single sign-on even if that means revealing personal logons and passwords [aggregation/credential caching] • Selection of content [channels] and layout [user profile] • Common channel navigation and icons [consistent look & feel]

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG • Java In Administration Special Interest Group • www. ja-sig. org • Conferences biannually • Clearing house • https: //www. mis 4. udel. edu/Jasig. CH/ • Collaborative projects

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Mission The Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) is an independent organization designed to increase the flow of information between educational institutions and companies involved in the development of administrative applications using Java technology. Today, with the benefit of object oriented technology and Java, we have a great opportunity in higher education to do things better as colleagues. The purpose of JA-SIG is, first, to share our experiences as we build applications with Java, and second, to develop a common infrastructure upon which we can build shareable components. We welcome the participation of both educational institutions and commercial enterprises in this effort.

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Goals The JA-SIG's goals are to: Nurture communication of best practices, new technologies, and innovative methodologies and projects related to Java Increase peer review, collaboration, and group discussion related to institutiondeveloped Java administrative applications Broaden Java technology cross-fertilization between firms and schools on both a functional and geographic basis

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Activities The JA-SIG membership is engaged in three activities. 1. Sponsorship of a twice-annual conference. 2. The JA-SIG Clearinghouse - a place on the Web to facilitate the sharing of Java components. 3. Development of a free, open source, open standard portal for higher education: u. Portal.

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Some JA-SIG Members • • • Boston College Princeton UBC Delaware Florida State Cornell Boston Georgetown USC MIT Cal Poly • • • Mississippi State Brown Yale Hawaii Columbia Cornell U Washington Minnesota UT Austin + ~300 more…

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG (UC Membership) • University of California, Berkeley • Randy Ballew, Jim Bullock, Jann Fong, Shifra Gaman, Kelly Haberer, Josh Marcus, Aron Roberts, Louise Schulden (JR), George A Suennen, Raymond Yee • UC Berkeley, College of Chemistry • John Ingham • UC Berkeley, Lawrence Hall of Science • Kathleen Connors, Carol Gray • University of California, Davis • Bill Grabert, Cathy Horiuchi, Deborah A. Lauriano, Sandra Stewart, Mark Youngs • University of California, Los Angeles • Scott Gruber, Anthony Merriweather, Albert Wu • University of California, Riverside • Stan Fletcher, Wesley Tait Stevens • University of California, San Diego • Marty Backer, Rich Backer, Christopher De Rosa, Chris Frymann, Elazar Harel, Lyle Kafader, Beth Surrell, Luis Valdez • University of California San Francisco • Mary Dykhuizen, Gary R. Forman • University of California, Santa Barbara • Karen Swartz, Stu Swartz

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG University of California, Irvine

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Cal. Poly San Luis Obispo

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Cornell University

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Illinois State University

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Ringling School of Art and Design

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG University of British Columbia

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Red Universitaria Nacional

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Universidad de Lima

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Yale University

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Denison University

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG University of Delaware

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Princeton University

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Columbia University

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Interactive Business Solutions

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Instructional media + magic

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG What is u. Portal? • Enterprise portal • Framework for presenting aggregated content (channels) • Personalization • Role-based access control • Open source, collaborative effort • Java web application

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG u. Portal Interfaces • Authentication • Proving your identity • Authorization • Deciding what you can access • Directory services • Such as populating Edu. Person • User preferences • Profiles, structure, themes, skins • Channel information • Availability and configuration

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG What is a Channel? • Displays content • XML feeds • Rich Site Summary (RSS) • Web services • Legacy systems • Interactive applications • E-Mail, Calendar, Briefcase, News, Survey, Search, Announcements, Classifieds, Discussion Forums, Address Book, Chat, Bookmarks • The Meteor Project • e. Transcript

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG The Meteor channel

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG e. Transcript

Architecture of u. Portal

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG What’s new in 2. 0? • • Abstraction of layout Structure/theme transformations Standard channel events Standard CSS classes More flexible publish/subscribe User profile management Web. Proxy channel

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Basic Architecture

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Basic Architecture Permissions authentication i. Planet LDAP User preferences Channel registry Other u. Portal Data Oracle db 2 my. SQL

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Channel • Elementary unit of presentation, defined by the IChannel interface User Interaction External Information Channel Content (Presentation) IChannel Set Runtime Data () Render XML ()

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG IChannel content must • Be well-formed XML such as XHTML, RSS, SVG, SMIL, or a SOAP message (HTML is not well formed XML) • Rendered by an XSL transformation using an XSL stylesheet

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Framework Organization User Interaction Presentation u. Portal Framework Channel

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG User Layout • User Layout is an abstract structure defining the overall content available to the user • user. Layout is a tree structure consisting of “folders” and “channels”, the later always being the leaf nodes

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG User Layout

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Structure Transformation User Layout Tab Column Channel Tab Channel Column Channel Tab Channel

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Theme Transformation

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Compiling the Presentation user. Layout Structure transformation XSLT structured. Layout set. Runtime. Data() XSLT Channels Theme transformation render. XML() HTML, WML Voice. ML. . .

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Content Transformation XML XHTML: Web Browser XSLT Processor HTML: PDA Stylesheet WML: Cell Phone

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Flexible Layouts • Structures • Tab / column • Tree / column • Themes • Multi-column • Multi-row • Skins • Matrix, Java

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Multiple Target Devices

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Tab / Column Layout

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Tree / Column Layout

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Theme: java

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Theme: imm

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Theme: matrix

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Architectural Features • • Extensive user customization Inter-channel communications Channel services Normalized database schema Profiles (multiple device management) Layout-specific preferences channels JNDI backbone

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG User preferences • Portal=rendering+customization • User Preferences Channel • Swappable layout and preference management modules • Profile management module • Tab-column specific UP module • Skin Selection

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG User Preferences

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Publish/Subscribe • Channel publishing document • Channel parameters • Default values • Modification permissions • Descriptions • Publish/Subscribe steps • Step sequence • Instructions, help • Flexible channel publishing

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Channel Types

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Channel Settings

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Channel Controls

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Channel Classification

Web services as an architecture

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG A Web service is • XML business messages • using eb. XML/SOAP compliant data transport • rendered using XSL transformations • for a remotely authenticated user

Portals, u. Portal & JA-SIG Web services architecture is • XML “tagged” data content e. Xtensible Markup Language • eb. XML/SOAP data transport Simple Object Access Protocol • XSL transformations for presentation e. Xtensible stylesheet language and now • UDDI/WSDL directory services Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration, and Web Services Description Language