1. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Deploying a Portal Solution: An IT and Academic Unit Perspective Dr. Harry Koehnemann Associate Professor Division of Computing Studies Arizona State University harry@asu.edu http://latitude.east.asu.edu

2. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Outline What is a portal? what is uPortal? Portal advantages What is going on at ASU?  IT organization  Division of Computing Studies Application integration strategies for uPortal Experience and recommendations

3. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest About Harry Academic  Associate Professor for 3 years in Division of Computing Studies  Adjunct faculty for ASU’s Computer Science for 4 years Software Developer  Over ten years experience, many in e-learning web applications  Understand software development and deployment issues

4. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest What is a Portal? “ “A site featuring a suite of commonly used services, serving as a starting point and frequent gateway” ** Single access point to a suite of applications Provides end-user customization and personalization ** http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/portal/

5. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest What is a Portal? Personalization/ Customization Authentication Single Access Point to Multiple Applications (should provide single sign-on)

6. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest What is uPortal? “a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education” Low entry cost  Complete open-source solution  Many channels freely and commercially available Vendor support  UNICON-IBS – channels, CMS, services, support  SCT – integrated into product, community involvement

7. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Who Created uPortal? Original development funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Continues with university and business collaboration

8. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Why Portals? One Stop Single access point and sign-on – simple, easy  What was that URL?  Which password? Record Final Grades Library Roster Class Schedule CMS Change Health Plan Check Pretax Accounts Manage Pretax Accounts Campus Organization Web Sites Payroll Traffic Fines Bookstore Dining Hall Register

9. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Why Portals? Serve Diverse Groups University’s scope spans beyond students, faculty, and staff  Does the home page communicate the proper message to each group? Students Faculty Staff Alumni Local Industry Legislature Grant Agencies Future Students Donors Parents Guests Local Community

10. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Why Portals? Personalization Give individual user the content he/she needs to perform tasks Add, remove, organize channels Add, remove, and organize channel structure (columns and tabs)

11. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Why Portals? Open-Source Solutions Open-source means: Value  Quality implementations exist for free Quick, easy access  Install and run in an hour Support  Active on-line groups  Commercial support exists

12. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest What’s Going on at ASU? Information Technology  Reviewed multiple portal solutions  Chose uPortal and rolled out instance in Fall 2003  Includes channels for payroll, email, news, etc. – more to come Division of Computing Studies  Using students to create uPortal channels to automate department business  Leverage portal instance deployed by IT

13. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest ASU uPortal Instance Portal Vision  “Front door to the Mall”  Destination of choice for all constituents  Cyber real estate for all online traffic Selected uPortal after extensive review process  Other vendors did not share above vision – too teaching and learning centric  Other vendor’s architectures were difficult to learn and integrate  uPortal architecture allows scalable portal site Channel content served off other servers

14. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest ASU uPortal Instance Initial role out Fall 2003 Attract 15,000 visitors per day Currently supports the following channels GeneralStudentsFaculty Directory SearchMy GradesPayroll Library Catalog SearchAccounts Receivable Dictionary/ThesaurusAcademic/Financial LinksFaculty/Staff Links Outlook mail clientBb Courses/Groups ASU WebmailStudent Fees Spam filter

15. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest ASU uPortal Instance Low hanging fruit – open source channels Single sign-on Personalization

16. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest ASU uPortal Instance More low hanging fruit – custom integration with campus services

17. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest ASU uPortal Instance Integration with campus records system

18. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest ASU uPortal Instance Integration with Blackboard and campus email application

19. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Division of Computing Studies Activities Write portal applications to automate department businesses  Use students for development  Leverage IT investment in uPortal deployment  Share results with open source community (scholarly activity) Projects  Tracking graduate admissions process (deployed)  Integrate UNICON Academus (uPortal-based CMS) and Blackboard with True Outcomes for outcomes-based assessment (started)  Manage “defense day” presentations and schedule (started)

20. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Graduate Admissions Project Current process involves routing paper forms

21. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Graduate Admissions Requirements No more phone calls from perspective students!!!

22. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Graduate Admissions Pages Graduate Admission Demo

23. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest uPortal Channel Integration Techniques Support tight or loose integration with portal system  Require more or less support from IT staff and resources Portal is an aggregator of content  Data, functionality, and content may reside in different locations Portal Content Aggregation Datasource Native channel Datasource Proxy/feed channel IT Supported Supported Elsewhere External feed/app Native channel

24. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest uPortal Channel Integration Techniques 1. RSS Feeds RSS initially designed by Netscape to build portals of headline news – now many different types of feeds (blog, etc.) uPortal provides RSS channel One-way information flow 2. In-line Frames Channel content rendered by external application outside control of portal system Quick and dirty, browser talks directly to server However, lose consistent look and feel, personalization, security, single sign-on

25. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest uPortal Channel Integration Techniques 3. Proxies Render content remotely and pull through portal Can require some changes to target application to facilitate better integration – look and feel, CSS, single sign-on Can pass information such as user credentials in HTTP header Proxy must perform URL rewriting Target must use portal’s CSS and constrained HTML (no javascript, etc.) depending on proxy’s abilities

26. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest uPortal Channel Integration Techniques 3. Proxies (cont’d) 1. Write a proxy channel (or use uPortal’s CWedProxy) Grabs content and renders filtering URLs and HTML 2. WSRP Formalized web service standard for proxy Specification includes standard CSS elements, etc. 3. JSR168 Portlet Specification includes ability to proxy servlets and JSPs Standard for rendering J2EE web app through a portal Requires some target modification to support fragments Also defining CSS integration

27. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest uPortal Channel Integration Techniques 4. Complete channel Application functionality and rendering performed by portal Data may or may not be managed in uPortal system database Portal Content Aggregation Datasource Channel Datasource Channel Web ApplicationCustom proxy or CWebProxy WSRP/J2EE AppStandard proxy RSS FeedRSSChannel Web ApplicationCInlineFrame

28. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Channel Advantages Portal (software developer)  No need to worry about login or role  Don’t need to manage deployment or buy server Department (academic)  More efficient - no more paper, lost forms, collating, etc.  Can perform work remotely  No more calls from perspective students

29. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest IT Challenges Open source means limited tools  Little support for channel development and deployment  No object (data abstraction) layer inside uPortal  No application development environment  No application management tools Policy for deploying outside channels  Rogue application can bring down entire portal (System.exit())  Where is channel’s supporting databases, server, etc? Standards – which? when?  Non currently sufficient – permissions, multichannel interaction  Will continue to evolve

30. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Departmental Challenges Quality of resulting product  Expertise with uPortal and web applications strongly encouraged Get support from IT, constituents, vendor  Need experienced manager/tech lead with allocated resources  100% turnover on all teams each semester “Hire” students for better continuity But…  the costs are almost zero with very little risk  there is great educational value for students - increased academic value

31. Thursday February 26, 2004 EDUCAUSE Southwest Summary Portals are the next step to a complete virtual academic environment  Deliver the entire campus, not a discussion board and a gradebook  Move closer to fulfilling the true promises of e-learning Open-source portal solutions provide an excellent boundary between IT support and department investment Departments can leverage portal investment with little risk  Need good students and knowledgeable manager with time  Need knowledge of software development process Knowledge of uPortal deployment and integration strategies key to productivity and success