1. Web Portal Development with uPortal or.Net Midwest Educause: March 24-26, 2003 David B. Williams (dave.williams@ilstu.edu) Mark Troester (troester@ilstu.edu) Copyright [your name] [year]. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

2. Overview Planning Demonstration Anecdotal Confirmation of Success Lessons Learned

3. Planning: Problem Need for virtual one-stop student services Legacy databases (dB2) for student records No enterprise systems like PeopleSoft or SCT Need to move from Cobol/CICS to Java/XML development Different reporting lines: Web services, Internet services, Administrative services, and others Minimal budget

4. Planning: Needs “Building a Technology Friendly Campus” Educating Illinois Individualized Attention, Public Opportunity, Active Pursuit of Learning, Diversity, Creative Response to Change

5. Planning: Solution In-house development Work within $500K budget UF Eagle XML middleware uPortal w/Sun hardware Consultant for development and mentoring (Unicon/IBS)

6. Planning: Budget

7. Planning: Strategy Mentoring with outside help (train our staff) Low-cost solutions (uPortal, Eagle, Sun) Lots of campus input and buy-in: early, not later Planning before coding (users first, tech issues later) Flexibility, design customization to our needs Stickies (need really useful things)

8. Results Made our 1-year timeline for development and first online test 3000+ new freshman used for summer Preview program More features than conservative planning proposed All 20K students by Spring 2003 with grade reporting and voting

9. Hardware Diagram

10. Hardware Environment Developers workstations Test server Quality Assurance Production Two portal database, PostGres CVS version control

11. iCampus Demo 23 channels live with 6 in production Of the first 10,000 students with access, 7,600 logged on, 5% change their layout The University Announcements Channel When grades were released, 2300 students logged in the first minute LDAP authentication

12. Login

13. Home

14. Redbird

15. Transactions

16. Schedule

17. Schedule/Map

18. Text Books

19. Grades

20. GPA2

21. Financial Aid

22. Financial Aid2

23. Email

24. Voting

25. Registration

26. Registration2

27. Login

28. Anecdotal Confirmation of Success It’s not a technical problem, “So”? The GPA Calculator is the #1 channel Students will always surprise us, swapping Confirmation from India Thanks for the errors, debit card 180 degrees from last year, advisors Not sending wheelchairs across campus Instructor’s email address works for athletes who always have time conflicts

29. Lesson’s Learned Collaboration works (JA-SIG, uPortal, Eagle,Unicon/IBS, others) Freebies work (WebCT, announcements, and e-mail channels, uPortal revs) Team building of users and tech support works Communication works (Passages, Preview..) Poor-person’s budget strategy works

30. Web Portal Development with uPortal or.Net David B. Williams, dave.williams@ilstu.edudave.williams@ilstu.edu Associate Vice President for Information Technology Mark Troester, troester@ilstu.edutroester@ilstu.edu Director Institutional Web Support