• JSR-168 is here! Everyone really wants to write good standards compliant portlets. Architecture and engineering is a harder sell (or at least the time/cost trade-off) but there’s wide consensus that standard portlets are the way forward — at least excepting a couple of us widget fans
• SOA is something people are interested in, but that there’s been relatively little forward progress on. Some is governance. Some is tools (SOAP, WSDL, and what’s this REST thing?). Some is just that it’s big and strategic, and there’s many tactical must haves. I suspect some of it is also that much of our interesting data/services are locked in vendor platforms that have shown little interest in opening up. Though, a small trend does exist of creating SOA-style services to reach into vendor platforms and extract data from them
• Mobile wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. Not sure why. Most people seem to be interested in the abstract, but with few concrete plans. Maybe my iPhone has clouded my vision, but I do wonder if we’re going to get blindsided come fall — our target demographic is basically 18-22 year olds, afterall…
• AJAX in portlets is still hard. There are some tricks like wrapper divs, namespacing, and builtin support and integration patterns, but it’s still not a common practice.
• Identity Management is big. Governance is a big thorny issue, though many IT departments are rolling out vendor products from big players (Oracle, Sun, a little IBM) in the interim, tho ugh the exact scope of those items is somewhat unclear.
• Oracle is really putting portlets in lots of interesting places. Webcenter. Product mashups. Inside BI tools, and other GUI devices. I think they’ve probably embraced the architecture more than any other major vendor which is an interesting trend.
• Lots of awareness, and wanting to look at uPortal 3. Ooohs and ahhs over both the AJAX D&D, and maybe more importantly the new content adding UI — good going Jen!
• Really beautiful portals — some, though not all new portals really seem to be breaking out of the lots of boxes approach, or at least wrapping it in neat functionality like Boston College’s Agora design. Nifty trend. Sign of maturity?
• Community Development is hard. Aligning roadmaps, agreeing on implementation strategies, and putting all the pieces together is challenging. Even more so, justifying “doing it right” (and fit to share) versus quick and dirty, or getting a student up and running was a big trend. Makes my inner-engineer quail, but my inner-economist says that throw-away code lowers the barrier for solving problems, which is a good thing. Evolution isn’t always pretty and all that.
• Lots of desire for training, best practices, and advice on policy and governance. Real role for communities of practice, not just code and software.
• Increasing interest in “Enterprise Learning Management”. Lots of worries about migration, but the beginning of seeds wondering whether our current platforms are sufficient for a foundation for the next 10-15 years, and University strategic goals. Of course, some of this is the “enterprise IT guys” getting pulled into the LMS discussion for perhaps the first time in many places.
• Good beer is key to facilitating interesting non-session discussion. Content is king on the program, but largely only because it gets people in one place and produces interesting spontaneous interactions. Hands-on is something everyone wants, but it’s not clear a conference composed of many 1 hour sessions is the right format to deliver it.
• University IT teams wear many, many hats.
• British Universities seem to have a much richer and more abundent IT project management structure than (most) American schools. Really interesting thread about Imperial College in London blending ITIL and Agile methodologies.

????????Just in case you haven’t noticed this yet, Google links to jay.shao.org now include warnings about malware:

Jason E. Shao » Blog Archive » Sakai SVN Vendor Branch Outcome This site may harm your computer.

Jul 17, 2007 … Soo… yesterday I completed my 2.3.1 Sakai vendor branch merge, … I had to use the trunk version of svnloaddirs.pl and patch it — see Bug …

jay.shao.org/archives/2007/07/17/sakai-svn-vendor-branch-outcome - Similar pages - Note this The best kind of warnings are the ones you get about something you’re aware of, trying to fix, and hoping no one will notice. In this case, working through the baroque malware site removal process. How did I get dragged into it? Well…

I didn’t actually notice until I browsed to my blog using Firefox 3 (been my default browser for a while now — I really like Safari too, but Firefox 3 is not you’re daddy’s Mac Firefox) and got slammed with a really obnoxious error message noting that the site was suspected of malware. The page looks a lot like the kind you get nowadays when you visit a site with a self-signed certificate, except there was no way to dismiss it (but use Safari…). About the same time, I noticed that Google search results included the note referenced above. So, naturally I read in a bit to try and figure out how to get rid of it. Well…

1. Visit stopmalware.org
2. Read a pretty long written description
3. Find no way to identify what triggered the malware warning on my site
4. Submit a request to re-examine to try and get some contact.
5. twiddle…
6. Get a message back identifying a single problem with the site
7. Fix said problem (bad iFrame, possibly copy & pasted)
8. Submit a 2nd request to re-examine
9. twiddle…
10. Get another message back identifying a different, specific problem (not mentioned the first time)
11. Fix said problem
12. Submit a 3rd request to re-examine
13. twiddle…
14. exoneration (no notification though) all is well with the web

So, aside from my personal irritation at this process I thought I’d add some mentions based upon some customer service observations:

• not being able to find out what you did wrong is really irritating
• not being able to find out all the things you did wrong makes it worse
• internet accessing processes that require real-people time makes them feel really frustrating

zotero is interesting, both as an example of an open-source project that like Firefox has had viral adoption, with a strong community marketing and communications effort. I also wonder if there’s a convincing Sakaibrary integration possibility, perhaps a direct gateway into the Citations Manager tool that let you save or push bookmarks into the citations manager.

Vertox - a plug-in for a plug-in is interesting. Video tagging is a neat application, though in many respect I’ve always thought the combination of OCR and voice recognition to auto index text & words mentioned in a clip, and index them would be potentially more transformative than manual tagging & citing.

Sakai has amazingly broad potential. The energy and excitement in the community and among those who have been watching Sakai make it clear that we’re really realizing the benefit of contributor’s blood, sweat, and tears in the form of some exciting tools for teaching and learning. Sakai seems uniquely positioned to become the base of a whole ecosystem of tools supporting different facets of the academic experience ranging from instruction, to assessment, to facilitating interactions between learners. I think we may be at a crossroads in terms of positioning, particular as we evolve towards explaining the product, beyond the project & community. Laguardia’s conference and discussions, especially those related to “Sakai vs. OSP” really focused my thinking on various opportunities for Sakai to support different areas of teaching, and learning.

A statement: I think the the common usage of Sakai to discuss both a specific set of tools supporting course/learning management (Sakai CMS/LMS?) and a platform/environment upon which those tools can be built and deployed has resulted in some confusion. I have heard many questions recently in the vein of “do you have to use Sakai to use OSP?” or “we’re a Blackboard school, and aren’t going to switch, does that mean OSP is out?” The fact that OSP is a toolkit built on top of Sakai (the platform) seems to be a confusing point for many who don’t currently have plans to deploy Sakai as a CMS/LMS.

To clarify, yes: it is quite reasonable to deploy OSP as a system exclusively dedicated to portfolios, completely separate from the other tools. Inputting text, adding reflections, uploading evidences, and managing assessment are all perfectly capable of being performed in a stand-alone environment. In the same way that past releases of Sakai downloaded from sakaiproject.org “stealthed” (hid) the portfolio tools an institution could choose to leverage the OSP piece of the Sakai ecosystem without forcing your users to adopt the entire environment — one advantage of the platform’s open-ness and customization capabilities.

In fact, I think this scenario illustrates a very real way to explain Sakai. If Sakai is a platform upon which bundles of tools (courseware, OSP, etc.) can be built, then we have a product with many facets. Each facet (LMS, OSP, Collaboration) supports a different interaction scenario, part of a greater whole of learning. Going forward, perhaps explicitly separating that greater platform from its concrete manifestations (particularly as courseware) would help emphasize Sakai’s potential as a learning suite or system — with facets focused on all aspects of a learner’s experience: courses, co-curricular’s, career advising, libraries & research, collaboration, and personal expression for a start. This thinking was really influenced by listening to many people talk about OSP — as a toolkit for building concrete artifacts: resumes, co-curricular transcripts, certification documents, personal expressions — all leveraging the same tools, but in many respects separate endeavors linked only by

I think there’s a danger that we could allow ourselves to slot Sakai into a box defined by the products that came before. though that’s where many adoptors initial exposure came from. The example of OSP illustrates the clear potential of Sakai’s modular architecture to enable assemblage of higher-level environments supporting particular styles of teaching or interaction. A common environment lets us both build on previous work, and also focus on integrating the experiences for out students and teachers, participants and leaders. My programmer’s mind sees this as being much the same potential as is now playing out in the Eclipse eco-system.

So the question I think this brings up is: if we focus on this broader picture, and think about these “bundles” as being the real deliverable, could we better frame this relationship by rebranding (consistent with recent thoughts about relaunching) the Sakai courseware tools as a separate entity within the Sakai umbrella — “Sakai Classrooms” maybe? Leaving room for thinking of the ecosystem as bundles, which you can mix and match: “Sakai Portfolios”, “Sakai Communities”, “Sakai Social Networking”. Different bundles of functionality built on the same platform, possibly using the same individual tools, but illustrating some of the broader possibilities.

Maybe Sakai thinks they are finished with this thing, but I’m pretty sure that D2L, SFLC, Blackboard, and all the other players are expecting it to continue on for quite some time. It could very well be that their input from this point forward will be minimal or less. However, their press announcement makes it sound like the whole thing is over. Clearly, that is not the case.

Having said that, Barry is right to point out that this case isn’t over, and I’m sure our edupatents crusaders would be quick to point out that even after this case is over, this particular wave is unlikely to recede any time soon.

Update: Michael Feldstein covered this situation, and how the process is related in terms of Sakai, SFLC, and others in his usual impressive detail.

In general I think the focus of “enterprise portals” has always been one of integration and convenience, and as a result these products are moving towards being the place that knits together all the attention streams a user might have across the digital (and non-digital) campus. I think there’s a couple key use cases, some of which have more successfully been deployed than other.

1. One stop shopping (typical) + SSO
2. Summary Views & Aggregation

Less commonly actually implemented, though often talked about/pitched: 3. Dashboards 4. Actionable Intelligence (you have overdue books, return them!) 5. Deep aggregation (e.g. pulling in all the announcements from different systems and putting them into one stream)

In addition to portals focused on horizontal integration, I think we’re starting to see vertical integration around “portals” in Learning, Collaboration, HR/Admin, SIS, Libraries? and other clumps of functionality. Some of the goals around bundling related tools together are similar, but focused around a particular toolset, or context. At some point these could probably decompose into the “lots of tools/portlets in the uber-portal” that I think represented the portal thinking years ago, but I think the reality is market forces, as well as organizational and reporting structures make that unlikely to happen any time soon.

I suspect the interrelationship w a product like Sakai to a portal is mostly as a provider of information/data — pushing out items like announcements, scheduling, files in resources, and exposing them in a different context. Ideally if we shift our thinking more along the line of wire protocols (RSS, Real SOA, RESTful APIs) this I think positions us to also start doing “network integration” where Sakai can also start talking with and working with say Banner, or Kuali FS, or Facebook, or whatever platform. I’m very impressed with CARET’s mySakai work, and think John Norman’s vision on this is similar to the kind of plan I’d outline as benevolent dictator of the Sakai universe.

Along this line, I’ve scheduled another LMS-Portal integration BOF for JA-SIG and would like to use this project as the testbed for both a WG, and an incubated integration project within JA-SIG. I think a lot of the architectural level aspects should really span LMS’s — e.g. if we do it right, ANGEL, D2L, BB, and everyone should be able to use the same protocols, though Sakai seems an ideal reference implementation. I admit to being weak on knowledge of the IMS-spec side, and am not sure whether there’s work on that front we can leverage as well. So far what I’ve seen at least on the TI front has been less API/Data centric than I think we need to go though, though Enterprise seems promising.

One particular short-term item I’d like to see Sakai expose more broadly is the group contexts expressed in the form of class enrollments & particularly ad-hoc groups represented by project site membership. In many respects I think this is the most useful data in Sakai — it’s a social-network like context that integration with and hooking other systems into seems quite valuable. Enterprise grouping systems like Grouper while promising architecturally seems to have had slow adoption, and I suspect fitting systems like Sakai with something like OpenSocial or Google Contacts-like APIs to mesh groups together may get us farther faster in the short run.

(Via Washington Business Journal.)

So, not only can I see an estimated delivery time, but if I leave the browser open (which of course jugar seguro portales internetjuegos portal internetruleta americana portalescasino ruleta gratisruleta americana onlinejugar ruleta onlineruleta pagina webtragaperras internetmaquina tragaperras portal webjuego tragamonedas,jugar tragaperras,jugar tragamonedas webjugar gratis onlinecasinos virtuales portalesapuesta dinero internetcasinos virtuales onlineganar premio internetganar dinero real portales webjugar seguro pagina webharveys casino hoteljuego paginas internetvideo poker webpremios internetjugar ruleta de la fortunaonline casino betrugslots comkasino on netvirtual kasinoswww online casinoswiss online casinocasinospiele mit echtem geldbaccarat spielewww roulette detop internet casinoroulette gratis spielenroulette lernenonline kenocasino bestcasino on net deroulette online gameskasino im internetkostenlose casino onlinecasino online und poker portalwww casino on net comonline casino österreicheinarmiger banditspielkasino onlineblackjack spieleinternet casinoscasino comtop kasinopc slots I did) you can watch it getting updated in realtime.

I assume there’s some kind of time tracking system in the kitchen that they’re using and some clever soul said (hey, we could broadcast this data to our customers). In any event, my pizza’s in the box, the delivery guy (Jian) left the store at 12:52, and I’m feeling hungry.

The major new features of version 2.0 include: * Events – enabling a portlet to send and receive events and perform state changes or send further events as a result of processing an event * Public render parameters – allowing portlets to share parameters with other portlets * Resource serving – provides the ability for a portlet to serve a resource. * Portlet filter allowing on the fly transformations of information in both the request to and the response from a portlet

I have to admit I have mixed feelings on the spec. It certainly adds a number of features to facilitate inter-portlet communication, and messaging which were commonly requested. Part of me does wonder though if Gadgets, Widgets, and platforms like OpenSocial are going to leap past the Java Portal space. The aggregation and plumbing aspects which we’ve really focused on in many ways seem much less interesting than standardizing the data model behind obtaining presence, personal, relationship, and other data — something that the social networks seem to be moving full speed ahead on.