June 10-15, 2012

Growing Community; Growing Possibilities

uPortal 4.0 in Action

Oakland University

Lori Tirpak & Aaron Grant

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Oakland University is located in Rochester, Michigan

We have approximately 20,000 students

We have been running a Portal environment for 5 years and converted to Jasig uPortal in 2009  

We were running uPortal 3.1.1 before upgrading to 4.0.2

We have 2 full time staff members and 4 student employees dedicated to uPortal, CAS, uMobile and portlet development

We have only focused on student experience

Staff and faculty can log in but there are limited predefined features

Introduction

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Jasig uPortal 4.0.2 (soon to be 4.0.5) Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 Apache Tomcat 6.0.35 Oracle JDK 1.6.30 Groovy 8.4 PostgreSQL 8.4 Maven 3.0.3 Ant 1.8.2

Environment

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◦ LDAP - Red Hat Directory Server

◦ CAS (Central Authentication Service) 3.4.8

◦ Ellucian (formerly SunGard HE) Banner

◦ F5 BIG-IP 3900 using Local Traffic ManagerUsed for Load Balancing, SSL Termination, Port Redirection

Integrated Services

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uPortal Web Servers◦ 2 Nodes - 50/50 Load Balanced

Dell Poweredge R610 Two Quad Core Xeon Processors Processor, X5550, 2.66/6.4, 8mb L1 Cache Intel Dual

Socket Nehalem 24 gb of RAM

uPortal Database Servers◦ 2 Nodes - Primary and Failover

Dell Poweredge R610 Two Quad Core Xeon Processors Processor, X5550, 2.66/6.4, 8mb L1 Cache Intel Dual

Socket Nehalem 24 gb of RAM

Hardware

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LDAP and Banner group configurations◦ This allows us to target specific groups of users with Tabs and

portlets

Progress to Degree portlet◦ Displays academic courses needed to complete degree

Grades portlet◦ Displays to student midterm and final grades

Academic Information portlet◦ List of student ID, Major, Advising info

Class schedule portlet◦ List of courses a student is registered for along with a link

to OU Bookstore to purchase required text books

OU MySail Key Features

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LDAP Password Information portlet    ◦ Password age, best practices and link to reset password.

Groovy build process◦ Rapid deployment of uPortal, Puppetmaster script that runs

Maven and Ant commands

CAS single sign◦ Google apps for education, Moodle, Org Sync, Symplicity

NACELINK, Blackboard Xythos, National Student Clearinghouse

Oakland University Google custom search engine integrated into Jasig Search portlet

OU MySail Key Features -2

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Announcements Feedback Calendar Campus Map Bookmarks Weather Simple CMS portlet News Reader RSS Jasig widget portlets (uPortal tips, sitemap,

Google map, Google search, etc) Search

Jasig Portlets

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Drew Wills and Jacob Lichner from Unicon worked with us to re-skin uPortal 4.0.

Drew worked with us to migrate our uPortal from 3.1 to 4.0.

We decided to start from scratch on student layouts.  We deleted all database content.

We moved from SVN to GitHub for our source code repository. Using GitHub has improved our upgrade process to include patches from the latest Jasig releases

We implemented Groovy Build process which helps with rapid deployment of uPortal.  Puppetmaster script runs Maven and Ant commands

We created Quickstart data to help streamline the Portal build process

uPortal 4.0 Implementation

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Load test.  Load is higher than prior versions.

Use initportal on the first node and then deploy-ear on all other nodes.  We had layout issues with our tabs because we used initportal on all nodes.  

Have a minimum of 4 gb for heap space.  We were experiencing Tomcat crashes and Tomcat 500 errors.

Reduce logging levels to info or warn.  Some portlets come with logging levels of debug or trace and this caused a lot of RAM usage and IO on disk.

We fine tuned our PostgreSQL database to optimize our uPortal performance

Tips for upgrading to uPortal 4.0

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We deactivated uPortal event tracking.  This was putting a high load on front ends and database server and utilizing 50% of our switch traffic. 500 mb per second.

We had to change code on OU and Jasig portlets to catch and not display 503 errors.

We doubled physical memory on front ends and database server from 12 to 24 gb

With uPortal 4.0.5 and our additional portlets we found a need to increase the amount of files that could be opened at once in the OS, the default for Red Hat Enterprise Linux was 1024, we increased this to 2048.

More Tips

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Progress to Degree portlet

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Demo

https://mysail.oakland.edu

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MySail Using uPortal 4.0

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MySail on a Mobile Web Browser

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MySail using uMobile App 1.1

June 10-15, 2012

Growing Community; Growing Possibilities

uPortal 4 in Action

UW-MadisonJim Helwig

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Infrastructure

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5 clustered Solaris servers uPortal 4.0.5, Tomcat, Apache httpd Oracle portal database Nortel Alteon Layer 4 load balancing

System Overview

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CVS - legacy portlets SVN - new portlets, configuration files GitHub - uPortal framework

Pre-dev – framework testing Shared dev – some portlet development Test – integration testing QA – deployment validation, customer testing Production

Jenkins, Perl, shell scripts for deployment jMeter for load testing

Change Management

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Attribute sources◦ Shibboleth◦ LDAP◦ various other databases

Group sources◦ PAGS groups based on attributes for major

populations and enterprise roles◦ Local group store for administrative groups◦ External custom group database for fine grained,

manually managed groups◦ Likely to use Grouper in the future

Attributes and Groups

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Virtual Portals

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Single, clustered portal application Three domains

One System, Multiple Portals

my.wisconsin.edumy.wisc.edu

mycourseguide.wisc.edu

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Publicly accessible curricular guide View differs, depending on whether or not

you are authenticated

mycourseguide.wisc.edu

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UW-Madison campus portal 80,000+ faculty, staff, students, applicants

my.wisc.edu

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UW System wide portal for 13 campuses Campus-specific skins

my.wisconsin.edu

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User Interface

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Subject-based Tabs

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Add, remove, move content Add tabs

User Customizable

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Desktop View

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Mobile View

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Content

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Focused on personalized content Aggregation of campus applications

Simple Content Management IFrame XML Transform Dynamic Menu WebProxy Jasig Bookmarks, Weather and Courses And many custom portlets

80+ Portlets

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Simple Content Management

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IFrame

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XML Transform

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Dynamic Menu

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WebProxy

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Bookmarks, Weather and Courses

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Custom Portlets

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Questions?