1. Portals in Higher Ed. Dan Oberst, Princeton University

2. “ I don't know that I can define it, but I know one when I see it... ” What is a Portal? Apologies to Justice Stewart

3. Enterprise portals provide a centralized, full-service starting point that allows companies to promote, deploy, and manage a broad range of applications, services, content and commerce offerings to web constituents. Epicentric White Paper

4. EDUCAUSE Review Articles §July/August 2000 l Portals in Higher Education Michael Looney and Peter Lyman l Institutional Information Portals Carl Jacobson

5. Information Evolution? §CWIS § Gopher § WWW § Push § Portals § ???

6. Gartner: Portal Best Practices l Be sure business problem or goal is well understood l Understand requirements w/o over-analyzing them l Max Hype Shields: Portals - second-most hyped item in all IT. l Don’t underestimate effort and cost of deployment G. Phifer COM-11-3816

7. Questions to ask about portals: §Who is the portal for? Students Staff Faculty Associates (other researchers, govt, industry) Alumni Parents Prospective Students General Public

8. Business Case/Support Model? §May vary by constituency l Initial costs l On going? l Self-funding? l Marketing expense?

9. How does architecture fit in? §Hardware/OS Platform §Web Server §Application Server §Development Environment §Database engine §Authentication/Authorization §Legacy & New application Integration

10. (Inevitable?) Vertical Portals §(CourseInfoPeopleSoft, MySAP, etc.). l “Tab” or link on enterprise portal? l Encompassed by the enterprise portal? l Replace/become the enterprise portal? l Compete with enterprise portal fragmenting population, confusing users).

11. Princeton Investigation §Two Pronged: l JA-SIG - (administrative applications portal) http://asigdev.princeton.edu:82/portal/ l Broad revamp of web site: Content Management (XML-based e.g. (worldweb.net) Expressroom I/O) Personalized/customized Web Site based on role §Separate Outsourced effort for Alumni l PCI (Publishing Concepts, LLC)

12. Evaluation §http://web.princeton.edu/sites/es/wsg/portal/ §Reviewed 29 vendors/portals §Narrow to 3 to evaluate: l Epicentric/GoCampus l Hummingbird l Sequoia

13. Epicentric/GoCampus §Go Campus - Higher Ed Consortium/ASP l Community of interest/shared development l Hosted Service by GoCampus l Epicentric Portal Technology WebLogic application server engine (JSP) Content Building Blocks (“clips”/XML) Application connectivity §GoCampus operation suspended

14. Hummingbird §XML-based server rendered in HMTL §E-clips “webscrape” content §Tools to pipe E-clipse to customize content,pages §Text search, retrieval, spider engine §Role-based access model §Prototype pages up

15. Sequoia §XML-based content access & delivery §plugins for HTML, POP §MS Message queues to manage requests §Scale through modularity §COM interfaces §Non-trivial implementation (infrastructure overhead)

16. Evaluation Plan §Deploy simple portal §Demonstrate user access/customization §Implement business function l e.g. Employee benefits §Meet with constituent groups §Evaluate cost/benefit