ландшафт. the exhaustion that was the combined CampusEAI Portlets2008 and Annual conference is now behind us, and it seems like time for some reflections and observations. Hopefully some of these items will be items which I expand upon at a future date, but in no particular order, dumped straight from my brain:

• 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.

Clay from Georgia Tech shot me an email recently which spurred me to try and put to words how my thinking has evolved about the relationship of an enterprise portal and Sakai, and where these technologies and communities are heading.

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.

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p>The Ed Techie: What Mailbox limits reveal:

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Grainne posted recently about the frustration of continually getting the ‘Your mailbox is over its size limit’ in our OU email accounts. I can’t tell you how annoying this – sometimes I am just trying to send a quick response to someone before I have to dash out of the door, but it won’t let me because I have to find and delete any attachment over 2K to free up space. Grrrr.

(Discovered this site through the Edublogs Awards.)

It’s interesting to see the comments on the gist of this article — in terms of how reasonable the restriction or attitude behind it are. IT usage restrictions always seem to generate two separate camps of apologists and critics. Apologists focus on the rational behind it, the need to balance services with resources, and limitations of the technology or workflow. Critics tend to express frustration over inconvenience, limitations, or restrictions that make their work harder, or prevent them from performing a specific action, or in a particular way.

While I can’t claim to have a solution to IT limits (regrettably, my superpowers don’t seem up to the task) I do notice that we seem to have an opportunity for dialog. IT Governance is an increasingly hot topic, particularly with institutions struggling to prioritize during lean budget years. We clearly have a pool of customers who are more than willing to tell us what they think is important.

I think the need to create dialog highlights one of the reasons a number of us found Collier’s MyUMBC feedback feature so compelling. By integrating feedback submission forms into every page, portal visitors are encouraged to communicate their reactions and thoughts (even about email quotas ) making the barrier to contribution very low. At the same time, while many of us have feedback forms that email teams, the MyUMBC example of integrating the admin panel & tools to ease followup/contact make it easy to go back, and mine through the data, or engage customers in dialog regarding their experiences with the product or service.

I’m happy to say that Jenn’s work on the feedback portlet stemming from the JA-SIG Unconference seems likely to move uPortal (and maybe someday Sakai or other portlet containers ) further in the direction of built in mechanisms to collect these user sentiments and provide information so we can work to better address our users concerns, experiences, and frustrations.

Single Mind Consulting – Summary of Sakai

Furthermore, Sakai is designed as a series of independent tools built upon a robust, standards-based framework (uPortal).

<snip />

Sakai’s uPortal is a powerful portal environment that utilizes the portlet specification to ensure interoperability.

This particular perception – that Sakai contains an embedded uPortal instance which it uses to do the aggregation of tools and services is not correct — (though it’s understandable given historical context — see below). Sakai actually includes a custom developed portal engine “Charon” which is used to handle site aggregation and display. In the 2.4 branch, Charon has some preliminary integration with Pluto 1.1 to handle rendering JSR-168 portlets. While this is the same approach taken by uPortal, the integrations don’t share implementation details beyond the common adoption of the Pluto portlet driver.

The original Sakai vision (I wasn’t involved at the time — this is just my perception/understanding) was for Sakai to just produce a collection of instructional tools. The uPortal angle is that the tools were going to be implemented as JSR-168 portlets, with some framework-style glue to support integration and common functionality, but leveraging the portlet spec to provide isolation, separation, and markup aggregation.

This plan resulted in discussion about partnership, and resulted in a portion of the initial Sakai Mellon grant being allocated to uPortal for development of the PortletAdaptor for uPortal 2.x, as well as creation of uPortal 3 — a rewrite of the uPortal framework intended to enhance/provide native JSR-168 portlet support.

During the course of development of both projects (Sakai & uPortal 3) however, delivery pressures and emerging understanding of the needs of both camps caused development efforts to drift apart. As a result, Sakai 1.0 shipped with a custom portal which I believe was a derivative of CHEF’s portal infrastructure (based on JetSpeed1?). As Sakai has evolved, a number of Sakai-specific metaphors like site-membership have been introduced, further splitting the functionality of Sakai and uPortal.

Currently efforts are focused more on integration between Portals and Sakai. Chuck Severance has done a large amount of work on summary views and other proof-of-concept exercises, and Sakai 2.4 ships with an enhanced Charon portal which supports alternate views like RSS which are intended to aid integration.

Hope this helps clear things up…

Tags: sakai uportal

I just got back from 4 days out at University of Montana where I presented a couple of sessions at the Portlets2007 conference. It was an interesting experience — most of my past experience has been at JA-SIG, JUGs, or other open-source heavy audiences which tend to be… shall we say… self-selected.

I did 2 sessions in the advanced track:

• Spring Portlet MVC
• JA-SIG Central Authentication Service (CAS)

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Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility Today at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Netvibes founder Tariq Krim announced that their upcoming “Coriander” release will do just that. Once launched, any widget created for Netvibes, Krim says, will work on the Vista, Google, Mac and Opera platforms as well. Support for Yahoo Widgets and other platforms will follow soon after.

Netvibes writing an adaptor for their widgets looks great. I increasingly wonder if uPortal should ship with a JS widget adaptor for one of the major APIs (though I guess we should right for say Google, and pick up Netvibes widges for free Then the portal container can store the preferences, but bootstrap the widget engine to render the content. Leverage all that interesting functionality the big AJAX portals are building

Building components aimed at serving needs of Kuali (Finance, Research, Student?), but hopefully reusable in other contexts. Kuali Rice – middleware to facilitate workflow, ESB, notification “Nervous System”

“Rice Client” tied into ESB to pass around real-time messages and communication. One of the goals seems to be to limit the amount of Java code in a client through a service layer, supporting RAD against this framework. Then you plug into the bus which provides service registry, remoting, etc. Sounds a lot like the RMI use-case is a key consideration. Client should support a lot of the service wiring and other connection details. Pushing to looslye couple separate products, and provide technical consistency.

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YourMinis is a Flash-based customizable homepage product that will compete for users with a number of similar products that use Ajax – Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google, Live.com and more. This was launched by a startup called Goowy, which created a flash-based productivity suite (email, calendar, IM, etc.) last year – see here for our Goowy coverage.

Actually, personalized portals might be the perfect use case for Flash UI.  Google-ability of personalized content isn’t as large a concern in most instances (especially if your data is confidential, so protected with a username/password). Back/forward navigation isn’t well supported in a lot of scenarios anyway too with the possible interdependencies of state. The same requirements that have made AJAX such a portal buzzword seem like they would contribute in this case. hmm…

Java.net has a project for a Portlet Repository Protocol that would let portals go out and retrieve pre-compiled binary portlets, which could then be installed and offered to users. I’ve thought for a while that portlets could do with Eclipse style add/update, and this seems like it could be promising foundational work to roll and admin GUI to allow installing/updating functionality.

I’m interested in topics like Open Source Communities, Development Methodology, Enterprise Portals, User Experience/Interface Design, Instructional Technology, and Identity Management and try to make it to relevant conferences and meetings when possible.

Upcoming

Limited events coming, though I’ve become pretty involved in the local Meetup Community in NYC.

Past

Portlets 2009 @ Canada

EDUCAUSE 2009

Portlets 2009 & CampusEAI Annual Conference (Cleveland, OH)

Jasig 2009 (Dallas, TX 3/1-3/4) Attending the 2009 Jasig & Community Source conference. Will be presenting a bit on some of the work we’re doing in myCampus around extending CAS for SSO w/blackbox applications, as well as covering Eugene’s presentation on Cross-Platform portlet development.

EDUCAUSE 2008 (Orlando, FL)

Jasig Unconference (Madison, WI)

Portlets 2008 & CampusEAI Annual Conference (Cleveland, OH)

Gettysburg Portals 2008 (Gettysburg, PA)

Sakai Conference (Paris, France)

Sakai Conference (Newport Beach, CA 12/4-7) – Attending the Sakai winter conference in Newport Beach.

JA-SIG Unconference (New Brunswick, NJ 11/12-13) – Am very interested in exploring portal-LMS integration and the roadmap/direction for the new uPortal 3 effort.

NJEdge Conference (10/31-11/2) – Presented a talk on Virtualization in Development and Testing.

EDUCAUSE (10/24-26)uPortal Training Conference (U. of Dundee, Scotland 10/15-19)

NYC Sakai User Group Meetup (NYU 9/25)

JA-SIG Summer 2007 (Denver 6/24-27) – I was on the conference program committee for the summer JA-SIG conference, and delivered a pair of Sakai related presentations.

• Integrating External Services With SakaiWednesday, June 27, 2007, 8:30AM-9:30AM
• Tuning Sakai for ProductionMonday, June 25, 2007, 4:45PM-5:45PM

Sakai Conference (Amsterdam 6/11-13) – Attended the Sakai Conference, to get up to speed and meet some of the various members of the community.

Portlets 2007 (University of Montana, May 16-18) – CampusEAI and the University of Montana organized a workshop/conference focused on portlet development. I presented 2 sessions, as well as met and networked with a number of University portlet developers. The sessions were:

• Portlet development using the Spring Framework. (slides)Thursday, May 17, 3:30PM – 4:20PM
• Central Authentication Service – CAS (slides)Friday, May 18, 10:30AM – 12:00PM

Spring 2007 uPortal Developers Meeting (JHU April 23-24) – XHTML/CSS theme work and anything that I’ve been doing with Jen from Yale related to AJAX D&D customization. Only made it to one day of this and dinner, but got to talk to a lot of other uPortal developers, and also picked up some Sakai tips to boot Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise (Philadelphia March 28-29) – Chariot Solutions is sponsoring a conference to talk about Enterprise, lightweight Java, Web 2.0 etc. I’ll be presenting:

• Leveraging RSS in Enterprise Integration (slides)Thursday, March 29, 1:00PM – 2:00PM

JA-SIG Winter 2006 (Atlanta 12/2-5) – I presented/facilitated a number of sessions.

• Assessing Identity Management Maturity: A Rutgers Case StudyMonday, December 4, 2006, 3:30PM-4:30PM
• Identity Management Best Practices DiscussionMonday, December 4, 2006, 4:45PM-5:45PM
• uPortal User Experience DiscussionTuesday, December 5, 2006, 11:30AM-12:30PM
• Providing Calendar Data within the PortalTuesday, December 5, 2006, 3:30PM-4:30PM

Fall 2006 uPortal Developers Meeting – Attended via video conference the uPortal developers meeting hosted at UW-Madison.Spring Forward 2006 – Attended this conference sponsored by Philly Spring JUG and Chariot Solutions. Was good, well focused, and seeded with implementors.Spring 2006 uPortal Developers Meeting – We hosted this one at Rutgers. JA-SIG Summer 2005 (Baltimore) – My first JA-SIG conference. I presented some of my experiences related to customizing the uPortal user interface.