2007 EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award

—recognizing innovations and initiatives centered on information technologies that provide groundbreaking solutions to major challenges in higher education, or change prevailing conditions in remarkable ways so as to allow new solutions to be deployed. Recipients are selected by the EDUCAUSE Recognition Committee.

uPortal Project

The uPortal project is an initiative to develop a free, sharable, constantly evolving, enterprise-wide Web portal specifically for higher education. It was one of the first attempts to apply open-source technologies in a collaborative development environment now referred to as "community source," and its evolution is part of the ongoing dynamic between commercial and educational technology interests. The Internet and the Web originated largely in the higher education research community. In the 1980s and '90s, colleges and universities reveled in new opportunities for information access and customization, decentralization, and diversity of applications. Portals originally developed for e-commerce seemed to offer a much-needed framework for organizing these complex information structures in a coherent, integrated environment based on the user's interests.

A community effort—flexible, functional, free

Although interest in institutional portals was high, the complexity, cost, and technical and political challenges of linking diverse campus organizations and processes were formidable. In the late 1990s, a group of institutions joined together to develop flexible, functional software to meet the common needs of the higher education community, a group that evolved into the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG), with uPortal as one of its initiatives. Commercial partners were welcome from the start, and their expertise was leveraged in project management, software development, and marketing.

An open-standard effort using Java, XML, JSP, and J2EE, the uPortal project is arguably the most successful portal framework in higher education, with hundreds of active installations and more than 650 commercial licenses based on uPortal. The uPortal code is freely available, and eight commercial partners as well as institutional members of the consortium participate in training, implementation, customization, and support services. This project has made at least two significant contributions within the higher education sector:

Stimulus for experimentation

First, within its own functional space, uPortal has stimulated hundreds of institutions to realize the benefits of portals for students, faculty, staff, and other constituents. Free and readily downloadable code allows many organizations—both within the United States and internationally—to experiment with portals in a low-risk environment. As the most widely implemented portal framework today, 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.

Designed for and by collaboration

Second, 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. This approach is increasingly recognized as a viable alternative for enterprise software across the institution. Open-source is now reaching into the area of administrative information systems through Kuali, with a community-source student information system in planning stages. The collaborative process on which the uPortal project is based demonstrates in a unique way the value of joint efforts among departments to determine how to best serve the community.

With this award, we celebrate a product that has helped transform the way our users access information and transactions, a process that demonstrates how we can accomplish more by working together, and a philosophy of design that lifts the application out of its hard-coded, institution-specific form and into a more universal framework that can be customized by each institution while maintaining its generic integrity.

This award is sponsored by SunGard Higher Education, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner.