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Web Portal Development with uPortal or .NetMidwest Educause: March 24-26, 2003
David B. Williams ([email protected])
Mark Troester ([email protected])Copyright [your name] [year]. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.
Overview
• Planning
• Demonstration
• Anecdotal Confirmation of Success
• Lessons Learned
Planning: Problem
• Need for virtual one-stop student services• Legacy databases (dB2) for student records• No enterprise systems like PeopleSoft or SCT• Need to move from Cobol/CICS to Java/XML
development• Different reporting lines: Web services, Internet
services, Administrative services, and others• Minimal budget
Planning: Needs
“Building a Technology Friendly Campus”
Educating Illinois
Individualized Attention, Public Opportunity, Active Pursuit
of Learning, Diversity, Creative Response to Change
Planning: Solution
• In-house development
• Work within $500K budget
• UF Eagle XML middleware
• uPortal w/Sun hardware
• Consultant for development and mentoring (Unicon/IBS)
Planning: Budget
200kConsultingMentoringTraining
100kHardware
80kReassignedStaff
80kNewPositions
50kMisc.
Planning: Strategy
• Mentoring with outside help (train our staff)• Low-cost solutions (uPortal, Eagle, Sun)• Lots of campus input and buy-in: early, not later• Planning before coding (users first, tech issues
later)• Flexibility, design customization to our needs• Stickies (need really useful things)
Results
• Made our 1-year timeline for development and first online test
• 3000+ new freshman used for summer Preview program
• More features than conservative planning proposed
• All 20K students by Spring 2003 with grade reporting and voting
Hardware Diagram
Secure/Encrypted
Virtual LAN/not Encrypted
CiscoLoad
Balancer
CiscoSSL
Accelerator
UserMainframe
OS/390
EagleMiddleware
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Sun Netra
Hardware Environment
• Developers workstations
• Test server
• Quality Assurance
• Production
• Two portal database, PostGres
• CVS version control
iCampus Demo
• 23 channels live with 6 in production
• Of the first 10,000 students with access, 7,600 logged on, 5% change their layout
• The University Announcements Channel
• When grades were released, 2300 students logged in the first minute
• LDAP authentication
Login
Home
Redbird
Transactions
Schedule
Schedule/Map
Text Books
Grades
GPA2
Financial Aid
Financial Aid2
Voting
Registration
Registration2
Login
Anecdotal Confirmation of Success
• It’s not a technical problem, “So”?• The GPA Calculator is the #1 channel• Students will always surprise us, swapping• Confirmation from India• Thanks for the errors, debit card• 180 degrees from last year, advisors • Not sending wheelchairs across campus• Instructor’s email address works for athletes who
always have time conflicts
Lesson’s Learned
• Collaboration works (JA-SIG, uPortal, Eagle,Unicon/IBS, others)
• Freebies work (WebCT, announcements, and e-mail channels, uPortal revs)
• Team building of users and tech support works
• Communication works (Passages, Preview..)• Poor-person’s budget strategy works
Web Portal Development with uPortal or .Net
David B. Williams, [email protected]
Associate Vice President for Information Technology
Mark Troester, [email protected]
Director Institutional Web Support
