Next call will be Thursday January 19, 2012 at 2PM Eastern Daylight Time

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I've been investigating along those lines too. Haven't been able to find much beyond the capabilities of Sakai OAE, which would leave some of the "personalize your own" integration quite lacking. I have a mockup partially in place, and it actually happens to have all of the features you've listed and I would be interested to get some initial feedback. Given we are going Google here at UM, I believe the easiest route to full integration would be to make the underlying platform Google and then make use of the APIs to create the specialization features. All in all, with Google as the framework, the bits and pieces are there, just need to stitch them all together. The "you might like" functionality is something I will be working on in the very near future as well. Anyone interested in talking more about this type of project, or possibly collaborating, let me know.

I am not sure if by U-portal you meant the Jasig uPortal project (http://www.jasig.org/uportal), but I would like to highlight some of the ways we have been leveraging it at UW-Madison - and some of our plans for the future. As a general portal framework, we have found it to be very flexible and fully standards compliant. You also have the active Jasig community behind it, developing and sharing portlets and functionality. uPortal's powerful groups and permissions technology allows you to make dynamic assignments like college/major upon login and target the content appropriately. The Jasig uMobile project (http://www.jasig.org/umobile) provides a framework that allows you to deliver secure, authenticated, dynamic personalized and role based content to native iPhone/Android devices. (By combining the two, you can develop or integrate content once as  a portlet and then be able to display it in standard portal view on the laptop, mobile portal view on mobile devices or as part of the native app). The Jasig Bedework calendaring project (http://www.jasig.org/bedework) provides a great way to manage public event calendars that can be tagged, published and consumed in a variety of ways. And Jasig CAS (http://www.jasig.org/cas) can provide SSO capability for these and other web applications, although they can all be hooked up to Shibboleth as well.

We can write pure Java JSR 186/268 portlets for rich functionality. Student focused ones include:

• Aggregated resources for courses you are enrolled in (e.g., instructor contact info, office hours, class location, library e-reserves, class web site, class LMS site); see https://kb.wisc.edu/myuw/page.php?id=4733
• Course guide - browse-able and searchable database of course related information including instructor provided content; see https://kb.wisc.edu/enrollment/page.php?id=9781 or try it at http://mycourseguide.wisc.edu/
• Scheduling assistant - a companion to our calendaring system that allows users to schedule appointments with others (e.g., advisors, instructors)   https://tools.wisccal.wisc.edu/available/
  

Then there are the portlets available from Jasig, many of which we use (see http://www.jasig.org/portlets):

• WebProxy Portlet - useful for integrating other web applications into the portal. We use it to pull in our Help Desk case management system (Infra),
  
• Simple Content Management - for creating quick static content
  
• Email Portlet - for quick and easy access to your campus email system
  
• Calendar Portlet - calendar aggregator
  
• Announcement Portlet - authoring and posting of dynamic role-based announcements with multiple subscription methods
  
• Scheduling Assistant (a portlet we developed and donated to Jasig, see above)
• Weather portlet - with international weather
• Facebook portlet - for integrating with Facebook
• Bookmarks portlet
• RSS portlet - for consuming and aggregating news feeds
  

This covers most of what you list below. A few of the other things are also on our wish list. Regarding hints about important dates, you could certainly plug those into an event calendar but I am interested in developing a flexible notification system that could handle both general date reminders as well as personalized or targeted notifications or reminders (e.g., you have a library fine, your enrollment date is next Friday). The other thing that we don't have yet is an easy way for students to express interests and then get targeted content based on those. It seems that uPortal's groups and permissions could be leveraged for this but we would need to build an interface by which students could manage their interests.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I am very pleased with the latest release of uPortal 4.0 and uMobile 1.0 and look forward to upgrading locally within the next few months. We have certainly gained a lot by being part of the Jasig community over the last decade and think other schools can as well. If you want to pursue this further, jump on the Jasig discussion lists or feel free to contact me. If you are looking for a more local contact, the folks at BYU are using uPortal.

(In full disclosure, I do chair the uPortal Steering Committee and server on the Jasig Board of Directors)

Jim Helwig
Portal Project Manager - UW-Madison


on 1/23/2012 8:59 PM Kevin Reeve said the following:

I am working with our student services organization who would like to implement a portal.  I know there are many definitions of a portal, and this one as they want has some unique features.

Some of the ideas being presented (by students who have worked for a semester figuring out what would benefit students) are:

1.  Single sign on

2.  Integrated Calendar

3.  Ability to schedule appointments with advisor online and interact with advisor online

4.  See your course schedule and add it to your integrated calendar

5.  Provides you with information relative to your college, major, likes, and interests

6.  Gives you hints of what you might need to do next.

7. Give you hints about upcoming important dates, registration, tuition payment deadlines etc.

There is more here, some of the ideas the students had include intelligent systems that know a lot about you and offer suggestions based on you.  

And all the college social stuff

Groups for clubs, organization, student government

Channels for weather, local activities etc.

Notices of events and info for things you sign up for 

Etc, etc,

So besides the Banner portal, U-portal, what else is out there? Any innovations in portal stuff, or any replacement type product for the portal including cloud based?

Would want something that has a framework so we could build our own channels, port lets etc.

Any ideas you have or have seen would be appreciated……..

Kevin Reeve

Utah State University

********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.

********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.

********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.

********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.