Recently I responded to a query on one of our mailing lists that asked why uPortal was particularly attractive to higher education. After all, there are a number of open source, Java-based portals available now. What differentiates uPortal from the rest of the crowd?
In this slightly edited version of my reply, I suggest that the excellent fit has to do with both some important, distinguishing features, as well as the nature of the uPortal community:
The key features that differentiate uPortal from other products, whether commercial or open source, are the ones that support the complexity, diversity, and decentralization of a typical higher education institution.
uPortal’s Groups and Permissions infrastructure is a good example. Groups and Permissions may be created at a very granular level in uPortal. Rather than high-level roles, a common construct in other enterprise portals, uPortal supports an unlimited number of groups which may be easily defined at arbitrary levels, from the Senior Class to the Elizabethan Drama Club to the Faculty Senate. These groups may then be assigned permissions that allow access to portlets, authorize actions on portal objects, filter news or announcements, etc. Group management may be centralized and controlled by system administrators or delegated to departmental or school-based administrators.
Group members may be derived from any number of sources. Since universities typically store person attributes in a variety of central and local sources–e.g., LDAP, administrative information systems, and other locally maintained group stores–uPortal’s groups infrastructure is able to draw from multiple sources to form a composite service.
Another key feature for uPortal is its very flexible layout management system, which permits tabs, portlets, and fixed clusters of portlets to be served up to users in combinations that are mapped to their personal attributes and subscriptions, or determined by business rules. The latest generation of the layout management system, DLM, contributed by SunGard Higher Education, is unique to uPortal. It constitutes a fine-grained distribution mechanism that makes optional or mandated content available to the diverse campus constituents who access personal data, school information, club news, announcements, and academic or financial transactions through the portal in highly personalized ways.
These features would arguably be of special value to any large, complex group of people that found it important to aggregate information from disparate sources to suit a huge variety of personal interests, while doing business in very customized ways. In JA-SIG’s case, we, built these capabilities into uPortal because higher education felt those particular needs to be acute and no other platform was adequately addressing them.
Which brings me to uPortal’s other strong attraction: our community of developers, service providers, managers, and designers. Higher education’s willingness to share knowledge, experience and local assets surpasses that of most other industries. Because uPortal is a product of higher education, schools and commercial partners have rallied around it to support each other in their mutual interest. So, for example, a request for help on a uPortal mailing list is often answered immediately by a peer. A growing body of knowledge lives on our wiki, and people can often find their answer there. Semi-annual conferences provide a place for framework and portlet developers, designers, and technical leads to learn from each other and collaborate on projects. Newcomers to the conferences are welcomed warmly into the group and given special attention. This energy builds on itself and helps sustain a growing community.
What makes uPortal a particularly good fit for your campus? Feel free to let us know by commenting here.
Posted by jjmarkow 