About Jasig uPortal

Copyright Unicon, Inc., 2009. Some Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/

Some content drawn from prior presentations at Jasig conferences and elsewhere.

Andrew PetroUnicon, Inc.

18 November 2009

Agenda

1. Introduction

• About Unicon

• About uPortal

2. Portal Core

3. User Interface

4. Integration

5. Infrastructure

6. Unicon Services

7. Roadmap

8. Questions and Discussion

IntroductionUnicon

Unicon Profile

• Located in Gilbert, AZ – founded in 1993

• Who Are We?

– A Privately-Held, Profitable Company

– Serving Higher Education

• And related industries

– Around 100 People

Open Source Services and Support

uPortal

Shibboleth

Unicon VisionAssist organizations to

adopt open source solutions and succeed wildly with them. Earn continued

business with excellence, not vendor-lock-in or constricting licenses.

Higher Education Customers – Partial List

Example CustomersUniversity of Chicago:

• Full uPortal deployment

• Shibboleth integration

• uPortal architecture and custom modifications

• uPortal Support

Johns Hopkins University:

• uPortal upgrades

• uPortal support

• uPortal branding / mobile

• uPortal architecture and custom modifications

Yale University:

• uPortal upgrades

• uPortal support

Commercial Customers & Partners

CommercialCustomers

Partners

ExamplesPearson Education:

• Full uPortal deployment

• Over 2 million users currently on Portal

• Communities, Marketing, Cross-Sell

Cisco:

• Full Portal, CAS, and Moodle deployment

• Workforce retraining in the state of Michigan

• Integration with WebEX and Google Analytics

• Communities and Marketing

Oracle:

• Chose Unicon to implement Standards-based integrations between PeopleSoft and LMS (Sakai) – SAIP

• Unicon is the primary provider of SAIP services

IntroductionuPortal

Enterprise Portals

• Aggregate Content & Applications

• Customization/Personalization

• Access Control

• Consistent User Experience &

Service Delivery Platform

Enterprise portals provide capabilities in 4 major areas:

Virginia Tech

University of Wisconsin

Brooklyn College – Student View

Brooklyn College – Faculty View

Consistent User Experience - Pearson

uPortal Intro - uPortal as Product

• Open Source – built by and for Higher Ed (2000)

• Flexible pluggable APIs for authentication, user

attributes, groups (integrate it with your sources of

data about users)

• Integrate via custom portlets, XML, RSS, web

proxies, and even raw SQL queries (platform for

integration)

• Powerful layout management

end end-user customization

of layouts (platform for

customization and personalization)

uPortal Intro - uPortal as Community

• Strong user community

• Conference and UnConference

• Active email lists

• Collaboration on open source software

• Incubation process for portlets

What is uPortal?

open source enterprise

portalby and for higher

education

Unicon Services for uPortal

• Implementation Planning

• Branding and User Experience

• Installation and Configuration

• Custom Development

• Consulting and Mentoring

• Shibboleth integration

• Upgrades

• Ongoing Technical Support

• Hosting and Managed Service

www.unicon.net/services/uportal

Portal Core

Portal Core

• DLM

• Error handling

• Restarting

• Full text search

• Performance and Scalability

• Statistics Reporting

User Interface

ApplicationContent

Integration

RSS Reader

Calendar preview via iCal / CalDAV

Pending UI improvements to calendar

Pending UI improvements to calendar

Pending UI improvements to calendar

Google Gadgets in uPortal

SQL Query

Graph of SQL Query

Graph of SQL query

Mail preview via IMAP

Infrastructure

Monitoring and Diagnostics

• Some built-in

• JMX instrumentation

• Nagios

Business Continuity Configurations

• Load balancing

• Clustering

• Geographic Dispersement

Unicon Services

Traditional SLA Driven Support

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toastforbrekkie/1237898664/

Some Unicon uPortal Support Subscribers

• University of

Chicago (Enterprise)

• University of

Wisconsin-Madison

• Yale University

• University of

Georgia

• South Dakota State

• SUNY Geneseo

• University of Hull

• University of Kent

• Sacramento State

(CAS and uPortal)

• University of South

Dakota

Support Lifecycle

• Short version: version supported for roughly

two years from release

• Long version: “supported” is a fuzzy word

• Cooperative Support for uPortal is structured

to avoid having to say “no”. Support gets less

efficient on really old releases, but doesn’t

strictly “turn off”.

Look Ma! No Hands!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nwinton/2685042231/

Look Ma! No Tiers!

• Cases routed directly to a Systems

Administrator, uPortal Consultant, or other

technical staff to make immediate progress

on your problem

Cooperative?

• Why do we call this support program

“Cooperative”? That’s just a buzzword, right?

• Well, no.

• The program is designed to cooperate with

the open source software project

• Compliments what you’d be doing without

paying Unicon for support

Cooperative.

• Support for the real open source software

• Free and public KBAs

• Continuum between no-fee community

support resources and for-fee engagement of

Unicon support

• Development issues directly in the public

issue tracker

Commercial.

• SLA-driven

• Confidentiality handled appropriately.

• Subscribers get to vote on where

development efforts are applied. Non-

subscribers get to participate directly in the

project and can of course collaborate with

Unicon’s developers, but get no vote.

uPortal Concurrency issue

• Reported Thursday by an Enterprise uPortal

support customer

• Analysis of likely cause and workaround for

issue to the customer on Friday

• By Friday night, Drew, Andrew, Jen, and Eric

informed and involved

• Public fix Tuesday in source, patch in JIRA

• high-priority email to uportal-users list

Precise details about issue

Public, open-source patch

Information updated in realtime

Caveats of this story

• Support cases typically result in workarounds

and/or creation of development issues, not

directly in fix patches

• This was a special case in that the patch

changes just one line of code, so articulating

the problem is synonymous with articulating

the code change to fix it.

• Which is actually an important point: we’re

trying to be reasonable.

In Other Cases

• The support case would extend to analyzing

and understanding the problem in as much

morbid detail as the customer wants, with a

workaround described if possible and a

development issue raised

• Development issued pursued under

Cooperative Development or Accelerated

Development or as a custom consulting

services project

Cooperative Development?

• Vote on publicly

documented

development issues

• Unicon chooses

among the top voted

issues

• Issues worked,

progress reported

• At no extra charge

http://www.flickr.com/photos/binkley27/292239798/

Accelerated Development?

• Just like Cooperative Development, except

you pay extra to have extra effort put on your

desired issues, regardless of their other

votes.

• Pay for sweat.

• But affordably: $100/hr

• Direct code into the open source project.

Hosting

• Unicon would be thrilled to host your uPortal

• Or to manage it within your datacenter

• As responsible consultants, we’d want to help

you think through the pros and cons of this.

Usually, we recommend keeping uPortal

within your institutional data center because

of its integrations with your services.

Mobility

Mobile Theme - Personalization

Demo environments

• Fluid’s nightly build of the uPortal trunk?

• http://build.fluidproject.org/uPortal/

• Download trunk and build it?

• uPortal 3.2 Milestone release when it (soon)

becomes available

Roadmap

uPortal 3.1 (already released)

• Stats recording

• User interface

improvements, use

of Fluid components

• Improved

administrator tooling

• Clusterable

• Supports all optional

JSR 168 spec items

uPortal 3.2 (next release)

• Improved administrative tooling for portlet

publication and management

• Mobile support

– “Beta” iPhone theme

uPortal 3.3

•JSR-286 Support

• (If no other features are ready, uPortal 3.3 will

still be released, with this single critical

feature.)

Andrew Petroapetro@unicon.net

www.unicon.net

Questions?