UC Portal Workshop
Notes – 29 November 2004
[It was very hard to take notes and lead the meeting simultaneously, so these are not up to my usual standards. Sorry! If anyone wants to elaborate on them to the list, please feel free to do so.]
Don started the meeting by providing a brief background behind the formation of the workgroup. A joint venture between UCLA and UCSD to share content and other information in the parallel development of UCSD’s BLINK portal and UCLA’s administrative portal resulted in the desire to broaden the discussions of standards and sharing opportunities to other portal projects on the campuses throughout the UC system. Don and Elazar took the initiative to form the workgroup with the participation of David Walker from UCOP.
Each attendee provided a summary of their current portal activities:
Chet Burgess & Bruce James (UCOP) – Interested in identity management and OP applications integrating with the Federated Authentication project. No portal project as yet. Interested in how UC4Yourself might be surfaced in various campus portals. UCOP Benefits has concerns about federated authentication which are the subject of discussion at this time. In addition to other things, they may need reassurance that all of their disclaimer language is included when their application interfaces are repurposed at the campus level.
Dale Federighi (LBNL) – Has been developing BLIS portal since November 2003 – a portal and a data warehouse. Has a development, QA and production uPortal (v 2.15). 550 users now – potentially 5,000 users eventually (all staff). 30-35 channels available (depending on permissions.) Reviewed Oracle and Plumtree portals but settled on uPortal – less expensive and easier to manage. Channels include news, announcements, bookmarks, directories, policies. Support a single-signon of sorts – proxy signon – logon per instance with no central server. Timekeeping and a few other applications are on it. Also a statistics channel (how portal is used). Planning channels for Oracle calendar, Web Mail, and departmental channels. Would like to upgrade to uPortal 2.3 and 2.4 soon. Interested in Shibboleth and workflow later on.
Margo Reveil (UCLA Academic Technology Services) – conducted three pilot projects with research institutes to investigate the use of portals to support collaborative research. Center for Embedded Network Sensors (CENS) and CNSI. Wanted to remove the webmaster bottleneck, provide an authoritative bibliography, sharing of pre-published materials, etc. Set up Oracle portal about 2 years ago (with mixed results). Need to store research raw materials and search across. Workflow for research VERY different than that supported by traditional portal products. Much looser – less structured. Research portals require collaboration tools as well (e.g. discussion).
John McCleary (UCSD) – Have implemented BLINK. Adding new functionality to BLINK has been on the back burner of late because they are working on the new student portal (Triton Link) and are converting BLINK from the old Vignette CMS product to the new V7 Vignette CMS and portal products. They expect to have an alpha of BLINK on the new platform soon. They are interested in classifying content across institutions, sharing applications, and establishing content feeds between institutions. They expect to tackle course management in the student portal “down the line”.
Greg Partipilo (UCLA) – In the process of developing an administrative portal using Vignette V7 on Windows platform. Goal is to eventually be able to scale the portal to handle all campus content. Using a subject area basis (rather than org chart). Have hired a third-party integrator (Neogent). Several workgroups actively engaged – a taxonomy group has developed the classification system for content. Have shared this with UCSD. Content workgroups: Human Resources, Buying & Selling, and Housing/Hospitality. Also a User Interface group that is tying the look & feel in with the External Affairs UCLA home page. Expect to eventually merge UCLA home page with the portal. Plan to have first production roll out in the Spring.
Marty Backer (UCSD) – Working on bringing the legacy applications (written in both older languages and Java) into the BLINK portal. Launching them remotely using Single Sign On. Plan to use WSRP for new applications and integrate them into the user interface.
Elazar Harel (UCSD) – Focusing on content (rather than applications). The administrative (BLINK) and student portals share the same architecture and CMS – just different presentations. They have eliminated tons of web sites in administration. Tricky business politically.
Katya Sadovsky (UCI) – They went the open source route (uPortal, eContent CMS). They have 4,500 registered users now but will eventually support all employees directly. Learned from UCSD’s BLINK project – stole their templates. Went with subject areas rather than the org chart – but kept some of the “store front” web sites for individual units. Using a 3rd party workflow system. Focused on integrating legacy applications – 3 now, more later. Broke the UIs up into little pieces and presented each in its own channel. They found this to be challenging – the application developers prefer to have the whole screen available to them for the UI. They plan to upgrade uPortal in March. They have a Content Editor and a Departmental Liaison. They have a homegrown, ISO-ish, cookie based SSO with Kerberos behind it. Using LDAP – want to eventually implement all roles – they have a couple now.
Tom Arons (UC Davis) – They are “huge victims” of their own success. They have had the myUCDAVIS portal in place since 2000. They use a SSO similar to Irvine – proxied Kerberos. They have 100,000 principles. myUCDAVIS is based on Cold Fusion on top of Oracle – locally developed. PHP web email with 28K users per day (80K hits per day). Licensing costs for Cold Fusion are an issue. They are looking at uPortal – they want to get out of the development business. Performance is an issue – there is resistance to joining the portal because of perceptions about slowness. They modified SCT Banner to use SSO authentication. The Registrar did away with grading by Scantron forms recently and forced everyone online. They deployed an Enterprise Directory (LDAP based), provisioned by the source systems. They are working with SIGNET (Internet 2) for authorization. They have a course management system written in Cold Fusion – it is tightly integrated with the portal – chat, gradebook, etc. They have content for faculty – e.g. online assessment. They find that they need more sophistication than a CMS can offer. They are a SAKAI partner – the Medical School and Vet Medicine are interested in SAKAI and are working with them. Big installed base.
David Walker (UCOP) – Wants to identify and share applications and content. Need to agree on interoperability standards. Two modes for sharing: take the content from someone else and host it locally, perhaps with local modifications; and, publish and subscribe model where content is hosted at the source and used with no modification (or with parameter driven mods) – portlets.
Jon Conhaim (UCOP) – Director of eBerkeley Initiative. Working on a Student Portal pilot project. The portal can be individually branded by the schools. 3 phases – working with Student Information Systems to develop a J2EE front-end to Bear Facts (30 year old system.) MyBerkeleyAPP – application for admissions. Building HAAS portal in August 2005 – working with the school of Information Sciences on user interface design (usability testing). Working on Identity Management. Joined with SAKAI – which led them to choose uPortal. Berkeley is providing the Gradebook module for SAKAI. Also have BLU (sp?) which is an HR and Procurement portal. Want to move to a campus community portal.
S. Kumar (UCLA) – Developed a portal for the Anderson School of Business at UCLA. Rolling out an MBA student portal based on uPortal. Haven’t looked at doing a research portal yet. Actively involved in the UCLA SAKAI project. Collaboration tools are of interest to them.
Betty Leung (UCB) – From Student Information Systems. Pretty old legacy applications. Trying to get them into the portal. Lots of security issues.
UCI experiences: Found that portlets (as an application interface) didn’t work out as well as they’d expected. They are using role-based personalization, but they found that staff aren’t as interested in customizing their portal as students are.
Portals allow you to put multiple things on the same screen simultaneously – promotes information “push” Can put applications and content on the same screen – puts applications into a context of information. Also allows user interface to be adapted to multiple viewing devices.
At LBNL, desktop will never go away – but expect that staff will use the portal to do work.
There are synergistic opportunities across communities – e.g. my.UCLA’s use of calendar between students and faculty.
Allows decoupling presentation layer from multiple backends, and providing a single cohesive UI.
Need for support for “deep linking” – linking to pages that are embedded several layers down in a website, without worrying about directory names changing, etc. Need standards for naming, or?
How can one make dynamic content searchable in Google? [Some of this discussion went over my head.]
Problems with ownership of content. Help Desk gets calls asking about content they don’t understand or maintain. BLINK has standards & guidelines for being a part of the portal that include time to respond to questions, availability, etc. Every page has a happy and sad face for user feedback that routes same to the page owner.
David Walker did a presentation on current and evolving standards. [David – please email your slides to everyone.]
Need minimum standards across the UC system.
The group agreed to adopt WSRP for supporting remote applets between campuses (and among portals at a campus.) They also agreed to use RSS for text exchange. JSR168 will be used within portals for surfacing applications.
I don’t think we reached any consensus on document standards (OASIS and DOC Book were mentioned as potentials.)
There needs to be a way to discover what other people are working on so that we can identify potentials for sharing. David Walker agreed to repurpose the old portal web page and email list (used years ago for the portal RFP group) for this group’s use. We will use it as a clearinghouse. Margo agreed to work up a matrix for portal projects to fill out describing their project that can be kept on the web site.
It was agreed, in terms of pilot projects, that it makes the most sense for UCOP to propose something, with OP developing an applet and an RSS feed that campuses can then surface in their local portals. Title and Pay Plan was mentioned as one possibility – Irvine has done this, but it would require rework to accommodate the differences at different campuses. An RSS news feed from the UC President is also a possibility. A subscription service for changes in travel policy was requested or an RSS feed with Benefits News. Also, a “View my Paycheck” applet or a retirement calculator. Bruce & Chet will talk to Benefits and others within OP about possibilities and will come back to the group with a proposal.
UCLA will send it’s taxonomy out to the group. UCLA and UCSD have already agreed to standardize taxonomy between them. Other campuses will evaluate and decide if they can also do that.
We will report back to ITLC at their next meeting on what we have agreed to.