1. About Jasig uPortal Copyright Unicon, Inc., 2009. Some Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ Some content drawn from prior presentations at Jasig conferences and elsewhere. Andrew Petro Unicon, Inc. 18 November 2009

2. Agenda 1.Introduction About Unicon About uPortal 2.Portal Core 3.User Interface 4.Integration 5.Infrastructure 6.Unicon Services 7.Roadmap 8.Questions and Discussion

3. Introduction Unicon

4. Unicon Profile Located in Gilbert, AZ – founded in 1993 Who Are We? –A Privately-Held, Profitable Company –Serving Higher Education And related industries –Around 100 People

5. Open Source Services and Support  uPortal  Shibboleth Unicon Vision Assist organizations to adopt open source solutions and succeed wildly with them. Earn continued business with excellence, not vendor-lock- in or constricting licenses.

6. Higher Education Customers – Partial List

7. Example Customers University of Chicago: Full uPortal deployment Shibboleth integration uPortal architecture and custom modifications uPortal Support Johns Hopkins University: uPortal upgrades uPortal support uPortal branding / mobile uPortal architecture and custom modifications Yale University: uPortal upgrades uPortal support

8. Commercial Customers & Partners Commercial Customers Partners

9. Examples Pearson Education: Full uPortal deployment Over 2 million users currently on Portal Communities, Marketing, Cross-Sell Cisco: Full Portal, CAS, and Moodle deployment Workforce retraining in the state of Michigan Integration with WebEX and Google Analytics Communities and Marketing Oracle: Chose Unicon to implement Standards-based integrations between PeopleSoft and LMS (Sakai) – SAIP Unicon is the primary provider of SAIP services

10. Introduction uPortal

11. Enterprise Portals Aggregate Content & Applications Customization/Personalization Access Control Consistent User Experience & Service Delivery Platform Enterprise portals provide capabilities in 4 major areas:

12. Virginia Tech

13. University of Wisconsin

14. Brooklyn College – Student View

15. Brooklyn College – Faculty View

16. Consistent User Experience - Pearson

17. uPortal Intro - uPortal as Product Open Source – built by and for Higher Ed (2000) Flexible pluggable APIs for authentication, user attributes, groups (integrate it with your sources of data about users) Integrate via custom portlets, XML, RSS, web proxies, and even raw SQL queries (platform for integration) Powerful layout management end end-user customization of layouts (platform for customization and personalization)

18. uPortal Intro - uPortal as Community Strong user community Conference and UnConference Active email lists Collaboration on open source software Incubation process for portlets

19. What is uPortal? open source enterprise portal by and for higher education

20. Unicon Services for uPortal Implementation Planning Branding and User Experience Installation and Configuration Custom Development Consulting and Mentoring Shibboleth integration Upgrades Ongoing Technical Support Hosting and Managed Service www.unicon.net/services/uportal

21. Portal Core

22. DLM Error handling Restarting Full text search Performance and Scalability Statistics Reporting

23. User Interface

24. Application Content Integration

25. RSS Reader

26. Calendar preview via iCal / CalDAV

27. Pending UI improvements to calendar

30. Google Gadgets in uPortal

31. SQL Query

32. Graph of SQL Query

33. Graph of SQL query

34. Mail preview via IMAP

35. Infrastructure

36. Monitoring and Diagnostics Some built-in JMX instrumentation Nagios

37. Business Continuity Configurations Load balancing Clustering Geographic Dispersement

38. Unicon Services

39. Traditional SLA Driven Support http://www.flickr.com/photos/toastforbrekkie/1237898664/

40. Some Unicon uPortal Support Subscribers University of Chicago (Enterprise) University of Wisconsin-Madison Yale University University of Georgia South Dakota State SUNY Geneseo University of Hull University of Kent Sacramento State (CAS and uPortal) University of South Dakota

41. Support Lifecycle Short version: version supported for roughly two years from release Long version: “supported” is a fuzzy word Cooperative Support for uPortal is structured to avoid having to say “no”. Support gets less efficient on really old releases, but doesn’t strictly “turn off”.

42. Look Ma! No Hands! http://www.flickr.com/photos/nwinton/2685042231/

43. Look Ma! No Tiers! Cases routed directly to a Systems Administrator, uPortal Consultant, or other technical staff to make immediate progress on your problem

44. Cooperative? Why do we call this support program “Cooperative”? That’s just a buzzword, right? Well, no. The program is designed to cooperate with the open source software project Compliments what you’d be doing without paying Unicon for support

45. Cooperative. Support for the real open source software Free and public KBAs Continuum between no-fee community support resources and for-fee engagement of Unicon support Development issues directly in the public issue tracker

46. Commercial. SLA-driven Confidentiality handled appropriately. Subscribers get to vote on where development efforts are applied. Non- subscribers get to participate directly in the project and can of course collaborate with Unicon’s developers, but get no vote.

47. uPortal Concurrency issue Reported Thursday by an Enterprise uPortal support customer Analysis of likely cause and workaround for issue to the customer on Friday By Friday night, Drew, Andrew, Jen, and Eric informed and involved Public fix Tuesday in source, patch in JIRA high-priority email to uportal-users list

48. Precise details about issue Public, open-source patch Information updated in realtime

49. Caveats of this story Support cases typically result in workarounds and/or creation of development issues, not directly in fix patches This was a special case in that the patch changes just one line of code, so articulating the problem is synonymous with articulating the code change to fix it. Which is actually an important point: we’re trying to be reasonable.

50. In Other Cases The support case would extend to analyzing and understanding the problem in as much morbid detail as the customer wants, with a workaround described if possible and a development issue raised Development issued pursued under Cooperative Development or Accelerated Development or as a custom consulting services project

51. Cooperative Development? Vote on publicly documented development issues Unicon chooses among the top voted issues Issues worked, progress reported At no extra charge http://www.flickr.com/photos/binkley27/292239798/

54. Accelerated Development? Just like Cooperative Development, except you pay extra to have extra effort put on your desired issues, regardless of their other votes. Pay for sweat. But affordably: $100/hr Direct code into the open source project.

55. Hosting Unicon would be thrilled to host your uPortal Or to manage it within your datacenter As responsible consultants, we’d want to help you think through the pros and cons of this. Usually, we recommend keeping uPortal within your institutional data center because of its integrations with your services.

56. Mobility

57. Mobile Theme - Personalization

58. Demo environments Fluid’s nightly build of the uPortal trunk? http://build.fluidproject.org/uPortal/ Download trunk and build it? uPortal 3.2 Milestone release when it (soon) becomes available

59. Roadmap

60. uPortal 3.1 (already released) Stats recording User interface improvements, use of Fluid components Improved administrator tooling Clusterable Supports all optional JSR 168 spec items

61. uPortal 3.2 (next release) Improved administrative tooling for portlet publication and management Mobile support –“Beta” iPhone theme

62. uPortal 3.3 JSR-286 Support (If no other features are ready, uPortal 3.3 will still be released, with this single critical feature.)

63. Andrew Petro apetro@unicon.net www.unicon.net Questions?