Some people have commented on updates to Facebook & Linked in, so thought I’d author a quick post detailing what I’m up to these days. For anyone who’s wondering, as of January of this year, I am no longer at CampusEAI – I’ve chosen to join ContextWeb, an advertising network/exchange vendor based in NYC, as a Sr. Java Developer. While I was very proud of some of the work that we were able to accomplish in the development group at CampusEAI, and will greatly miss both the team and many of the community members (and hope that we keep in touch), it was time for me to move on to doing something different (and possibly spending some time with my family, and especially my kids).

So far, ContextWeb is a pretty neat place – a strong technical team focused on Agile(Scrum) and trying to do the right thing. One of the interesting challenges is the company is currently in the process of moving much of the infrastructure from an ASP.Net/SQL Server backend to a cloud-friendly, Java, OpenSource, and Hadoop backed system. While the shift has been going on for a while, it’s accelerated recently due to a number of upcoming product offerings and business requirements (in fact, see previous posts, ContextWeb is hiring Java devs). So it’s exciting in a lot of ways, both being able to go back to doing real coding and hands on development (apparently I do mostly remember what all those buttons in Eclipse do…) as well as working with a pretty good group of guys (though, some of those C# conventions drive me batty).

If anyone noticed that I finally gave in and really added banner ads to my blog, well I do now work for an online advertising exchange… (It’s definitely not because this site is making me lots of money)

I will still definitely be following what happens with Jasig, Sakai, and Kuali, and am optimistic that it’s an exciting time for those projects and communities – and will eagerly read anything Google flags for me to look at.

Listening to Scott talk about CAS4 work and effort. Core items he’s mentioned look to be:

• Redesigned to better support non-CAS protocols (e.g. SAML, etc.)
• Increased emphasis on SAML as a product
• Better admin tools (service administration, workflow for registering services)
• Eased configuration (w/o needing to edit deployerContext.xml)
• Better extension points: captcha, “password expired” messages
• Governance and other changes

Scott’s mentioned the timeframe is end of this year, with Rutgers looking to go-live over the summer. Cas 3.3.x is still the production maintenance release, and there are intentions for a transition period, though some of the details have not yet been worked out.

In Dallas at the Jasig Conference, getting ready for the Board meeting where we’ll be looking at licensing, incubation, and some other strategic concerns related to open-source in HigherEd. Already had some great conversations about CAS & credential replay, Peoplesoft integration, and open-source economics & dynamics.

P.S. Ian Dolphin clarified over beers last night that he has not actually hit 2 million miles, and that’s a meme that Chuck Severance has propagated through the net space

Eric posted the video from uPortal’s EDUCAUSE Catalyst award onto Youtube:

So, the JA-SIG un-conference (even the working sessions) is over, giving me a chance to do some thinking and reflection about the event and its aftermath.

Overall, the attendance, interest, and excitement demonstrated by all of the participants was pretty overwhelming. We had both more individuals, institutions, and organizations represented than we ever would have anticipated for an inaugural event. Even JA-SIG product deployers like Collier from UMBC and FLUID were well represented. While everyone undoubtedly came away from the event with different thoughts, two items struck me as particularly exciting.

MyUMBC

Collier demonstrated the MyUMBC work he’s been doing. While not uPortal based, the reactions related to the functionality of his portal ranged from “wow, I want it” to “you built that yourself?” to “don’t show that to my users or they’ll want it.” A couple of thoughts on why everyone in attendance found Collier’s work so compelling:

• Presentation: Collier threw away the assumption a portal must allow users to add/remove/re-arrange content. This dramatically simplified his problem domain, and allows him to capitalize on web-design techniques to tune his layout and presentation.
• Focus: MyUMBC is focused on end-user tools, not building frameworks. While in many portal project 75% of the time seems to be spent bringing up the platform, and making changes there, Collier spent 75% of his time building tools for news, events, favorites, etc.
• Integration: MyUMBC has a number of tools and concepts that serve to knit the experience together — the favorite stars, the dashboard on the start page, navigation cues all make the experience feel integrated
• Feedback & Monitoring: MyUMBC built a feedback system integrated into every page, and a lightweight dashboard to extract key statistics from that system. As a result, feedback is easy (~6000 in less than 6 months) and mining the data for trends is also correspondingly easy. This combined with standard tools like Google Analytics support a nice feedback-response loop while requiring minimal custom tooling.

Portlets

JA-SIG and uPortal have always been very focused on building out uPortal as a portal Framework. A consistent thread throughout the un-conference however (partly sparked by MyUMBC) is a bubbling thread of focusing on portlets and tools. I think there’s a growing recognition in the community that the tools are what users are visiting a portal for in the first place — and an area we have not focused as much attention on in the past.

In particular, collaborative efforts in the portlet space received a lot of discussion at several different sessions. LMS, SIS, Library, and other areas all seem to be places where schools have repeatedly re-invented the wheel. Collier’s demonstration of the return from focusing on tools, and the timing related to the talk on JA-SIG project incubation I think have all contributed to an atmosphere where people are highly interested in collaborating higher up the stack.

After taking out a while to do introductions and handle the administrativa (even unconfs can’t seem to get away from it) we’re into the lightning talks which I’m trying to keep up with to podcast. They’re going pretty fast, we’ve gone through something like 6 so far, and they’re coming up fast.

Update: I was reminded (and should have been more explicit in the original post) that you really need permission to distribute recordings of speakers. To clarify — I have recordings of most of the lightning talks, but certainly intend to email all of the speakers to ask for permission before posting. I had hoped to have real release forms available for the event, but didn’t quite make it — in the future events we certainly aim to have all our ducks in order in advance.

At the Community Source reception cosponsored by JA-SIG, Sakai, Kuali it was uplifting to see the number of people participating. CIOs, managers, developers, vendors were all present in abundance. It was also clear from conversation at the reception that open-source in the Higher Ed is breaking into new areas. While there’s no question infrastructure and back-end systems, there’s increasing acknowledgment that open-source might has a role to play in end-user facing systems too. community driven open-source projects are being evaluated right along side best of breed solutions from vendors or ASP providers.

In fact, further than just being considered on par with packaged or commercial products, many, many people have indicated the message of “by Higher Education, for Higher Education” really resonates both within IT as well as with our end users. Ranging from solid support for integration with existing systems in uPortal, to teaching and learning as evidenced by the comment “It seems like EDUCAUSE is all Sakai” show a tremendous amount of attention and consideration being given for education build open-source solutions.

This post is me catching up with my podcasting from the JA-SIG Summer 2007 Conference in Denver. Matt Raible did a rendition of his Java Frameworks talk, discussing his experience with the various Java web frameworks. I’ve attached an (OK) audio transcript of the talk, which Matt also blogged about at: http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/ja_sig_comparing_java_web where he also posted a copy of his slides.

Looks like I’m famous A Q&A on how I got involved with JA-SIG and some of my thoughts on education and open-source was posted in the latest issue of the JA-SIG Newsletter (which Roger has done a superior job of publishing monthly, and on a real schedule too — congratulations!)

Open Source Portal Project Honored as Catalyst

Campustech did a short piece on JA-SIG uPortal winning EDUCAUSE’s Catalyst Award, where they mentioned the award, and then quoted some bits from Jim H…

Jim Helwig, the project manager of the uPortal project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Department of Information Technology, said the project represented the cooperative spirit of higher education.

“It is great to be a part of this,” he said. “This is a great example of higher education institutions working well together and accomplishing a lot…. We should feel proud.”

and Jonathan Markow…

Jonathan Markow, chairman of JA-SIG, said the award “is particularly meaningful because it reflects the robust health and size of our community, as well as the maturity of the uPortal platform.”