Portals

Dickinson College and Pennsylvania College of Technology recently implemented portal solutions in under 365 days. This presentation will describe the high-level planning and management of fast-track portal implementations. The necessary decisions and trade-offs realized will be highlighted. We will also present the lessons learned from our 365-day portal implementations.

To discourage repeat student violations of the UMBC academic integrity policy and to encourage faculty to report them, the Office of Information Technology used the campus portal to track, report, and alert all parties of AI incidents. Summary reports publicly document UMBC's change over time and students' changing behavior.

Many schools desire to make improvements to successfully piloted systems to make them truly enterprise systems. This presentation will describe techniques for managing, improving, maintaining, and operating critical enterprise systems. These techniques have been culled from years of experience managing enterprise portals. While the working example focuses on the campus portal, much of this can be applied to other enterprise systems.

Topics will include organization and governance; team communication; developer communication, tools, and environments; testing tools and techniques; code migration; architecting for stability, reliability, and performance; monitoring; statistical reporting; help desk support and issue tracking; and user surveys.

You will leave the seminar with a comprehensive list of possible improvements to an existing system or items to consider when developing the implementation plan for your next system deployment to help make it a truly enterprise-grade system.

In February 2007, Google announced Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE), a collaboration and communication solution offered as software as a service (SaaS). Initially combining a portal, e-mail, instant messaging (IM), calendars, document sharing, and concurrent document creation -- all for the price of $50 per user per year -- the solution rapidly caught enterprises' imaginations.
This Burton Group study suggests that quickly adopting GAPE without understanding its quirks or looking at other alternatives is likely to become a career-limiting move. Happily, looking at the larger picture -- studying a variety of SaaS-based collaboration and content solutions -- is a career-enhancing move. Issues for higher education to consider include the SaaS delivery model, the capabilities of the solution, and Google as a company.
Links to documents within this file might require secure access to restricted Web sites.

This panel will tell the story of the uPortal project, a community effort to develop a free, sharable, enterprise-wide Web portal specifically for higher education. The flagship project for JA-SIG (the Java Applications Special Interest Group), uPortal has become the most widely used portal in production in higher education.

WINNER: 2007 EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award.

Assessing the effectiveness of a portal solution requires more than statistical analysis. In this presentation we will go beyond simple quantitative analysis (number of "hits" or visits) to assess the effectiveness of a portal based on qualitative attributes (integration, personalization, and customization) to assist in the evaluation of a current or future portal implementation.

These are slides and videos from the second annual Portal Conference at Gettysburg College, held June 5-8, 2007.