That portal -- that bloody portal….. University of Wisconsin - Madison Common Solutions Group Sanibel Island Florida January 10, 2002 Annie Stunden (Without poems)

My UW-Madison The Story We Tell Our Community

But, I’m gonna tell you a different story.

Sorry I Spilled It From: Falling Up, poems and drawing by Shel Silverstein, Harper Collins Publishers You’ll have to go to the book!

This has been very hard. We are trying to integrate lots of pieces with single-sign on and end user personalization.

Net ID Activation My Front Page –IPlanet (one of the real challenges) –Campus Announcements –Campus Events Listings –Campus News Academic Tab –Enrollment (PeopleSoft HTML Access) –Class List (PeopleSoft HTML Access –Assigned Advisor –Links to Advising Related Pages –Links to Course Web Pages (including WebCT) –Custom Content for selected specific programs

Calendar Tab –Steltor Corporate Time calendar –Academic Calendars Library Tab –MadCat library catalog –Journals and Reference Materials Campus Life Tab –Student Union events –Registered Student Organizations

Financial Tab –Tuition Account –Financial Aid Awards –Financial Aid Eligibility

My Record Tab –Timetable and Catalog –Changes of Address –Grades and Grade Reports –Fines and Holds –Expected Graduation Term –Degree Audit Reports (DARS) –Degree Audit What-If Reports (DARS)

Technology Infrastructure OS: Sun Solaris Application Server: IBM Webspere but we are looking at other options Portal Server: Epicentric Foundation Server 3.5 Sitting on 2 Dell Web Servers, 2 Sun E 420s for application and portal servers and 1 SUN E450 for Oracle Databasse Server

Some of the Challenges We brought this up small and went to big. We didn’t originally put a separate test environment in place. This was a crash effort as we went big. Our hardware environment required new network switching between some of the servers. We invented as we went along. Cisco layer two switches and Alteon layer four switches. We learned as we went. Alteon and cookies were a problem.

Bringing up web based course enrollment - a political nightmare, but also not an easy technical task. PeopleSoft’s HTML Access was not easy to “portalize”. Roles definition. We are still struggling with this - and it is very hard to get technical purists to accept practical compromises.

The thing. We have gone from one crisis to another here. Our current one is an interface challenge between mail and the ldap directory. We have about 6,000 students on the new mail service. We are trying to convert the rest of our community (50,000 plus or minus). Last I heard was we would need an 800 times improvement in our system performance to manage this load. It’s I-Planet’s e- mail and I-Planet’s directory but we don’t know if they know that each other exists at the corporate level. A compounding factor was that our mail team was NT smart and we are installing a UNIX product.

Project Management - Didn’t formalize it early enough. We were running this by a committee with the technololgist responsible for the portal technology trying to hold all the pieces together. The entire effort is cross organizational (and to some extent counter cultural) and we needed to manage across the organization and the cultures. We finally took one of our more orderly directors and gave him responsibility for project coordination. I’m not sure he has enough authority - but it sure has helped.

Ongoing support - We have something that 40,000 students have access to that doesn’t feel very stable to us yet. Students keep hitting the feedback button and providing us feedback, reporting issues and problems or simply asking questions. We try to answer them all and solve problems with the cooperation of our partners around campus.

What’s Next? Solving the conundrum and getting incorporated in the portal for entire community. Password security - at least. Additional student services - primarily in the advising area. Bringing up the portal for faculty and staff with additional functionality this spring. For starters: –Advisor view high on priority list of steering committee. –WISDM a reporting tool. –WebDAS - department accounting system. –On line Tech Store. –WISC (software distribution,

And System Upgrade Issues PeopleSoft 8.0 will be implemented for student services this summer. Changes web course enrollment. Offers other opportunities for portal integration. New version of EpiCentric staring at us. WebCT upgrade to occur this summer OUCH!! As we said, we are not happy with WebSphere and are looking at options.

This Has Been Hard Would we do it again?- Absolutely! Would we do it different? - For sure! Do we know how to do it right yet? - Nope! Are we pleased with where we are? - Yup!

Key Lessons This Is Not a Skunk Works Project Project Management - We needed to look at this as bigger from the get-go and put strong project management in place. Test Environment - This is an enterprise wide endeavor. We needed a good test environment. Something we all know - everything takes longer than you plan. So add contingency time. And we are still fast-tracking and inventing as we go along!

SETTIN’ AROUND (more Shel Silverstein) Again - see the book