Portals in Higher Ed.

Dan Oberst, Princeton University

“I don't know that I can define it, but I know one when I see it...”

What is a Portal?

Apologies to Justice Stewart

Enterprise portals provide a centralized, full-service starting point that allows companies to promote, deploy, and manage a broad range of applications, services, content and commerce offerings to web constituents.

Epicentric White Paper

EDUCAUSE Review Articles

July/August 2000 Portals in Higher Education

• Michael Looney and Peter Lyman Institutional Information Portals

• Carl Jacobson

Information Evolution?

CWIS Gopher WWW Push Portals ???

Gartner: Portal Best Practices

Be sure business problem or goal is well understood

Understand requirements w/o over-analyzing them

Max Hype Shields:• Portals - second-most hyped item in all IT.

Don’t underestimate effort and cost of deployment

G. Phifer COM-11-3816

Questions to ask about portals:

Who is the portal for?• Students

• Staff

• Faculty

• Associates (other researchers, govt, industry)

• Alumni

• Parents

• Prospective Students

• General Public

Business Case/Support Model?

May vary by constituency Initial costs On going? Self-funding? Marketing expense?

How does architecture fit in?

Hardware/OS PlatformWeb ServerApplication ServerDevelopment EnvironmentDatabase engineAuthentication/AuthorizationLegacy & New application Integration

(Inevitable?) Vertical Portals

(CourseInfoPeopleSoft, MySAP, etc.). “Tab” or link on enterprise portal? Encompassed by the enterprise portal? Replace/become the enterprise portal? Compete with enterprise portal

• fragmenting population, confusing users).

Princeton Investigation

Two Pronged: JA-SIG - (administrative applications portal)

• http://asigdev.princeton.edu:82/portal/ Broad revamp of web site:

• Content Management (XML-based e.g. (worldweb.net) Expressroom I/O)

• Personalized/customized Web Site based on role

Separate Outsourced effort for Alumni PCI (Publishing Concepts, LLC)

Evaluation

http://web.princeton.edu/sites/es/wsg/portal/Reviewed 29 vendors/portalsNarrow to 3 to evaluate:

Epicentric/GoCampus Hummingbird Sequoia

Epicentric/GoCampus

Go Campus - Higher Ed Consortium/ASP Community of interest/shared development Hosted Service by GoCampus Epicentric Portal Technology

• WebLogic application server engine (JSP)

• Content Building Blocks (“clips”/XML)

• Application connectivity

GoCampus operation suspended

Hummingbird

XML-based server rendered in HMTLE-clips “webscrape” contentTools to pipe E-clipse to customize

content,pagesText search, retrieval, spider engineRole-based access modelPrototype pages up

Sequoia

XML-based content access & deliveryplugins for HTML, POPMS Message queues to manage requestsScale through modularityCOM interfacesNon-trivial implementation (infrastructure

overhead)

Evaluation Plan

Deploy simple portalDemonstrate user access/customizationImplement business function

e.g. Employee benefits

Meet with constituent groupsEvaluate cost/benefit