I’m at the JA-SIG UK meeting in Edinburgh today. JA-SIG are the driving force behind uPortal, and that is the focus of today’s meeting. I’ve not been to one of these before, so I’m hoping it isn’t too techie for me.
The main reason I’m here is to hear what University of Nottingham have done with the Portal and Content Management – they have the same portal software (Luminis – a commercialised version of uPortal), and the same CMS (Luminis Content Management System – LCMS) as us, and as we are hoping to pilot the LCMS this year, it is quite timely.
First up – Introductions from people here, and some information about how far people have got with uPortal. I’ve tried to capture the more interesting aspects of this here.
University of Edinburgh
Have been ‘playing’ with uPortal over several year. Focus on Alumni initially, then Staff. Now have launched for students – over 26,000 users on the portal system. Many of the systems being accessed via the portal are Oracle based. They use the ‘web proxy’ tool to integrate legacy systems. Now looking at portal services for ‘visitors’ – both formal (visiting lecturers) and informal (parents).
Edinburgh use ‘Cosign’ for SSO
University of Nottingham
Have a portal team of 8-9 people – what a luxury. They are using the Luminis product 3.III, approx 30,000 students and 5,500 staff, and between 20,000 and 40,000 prospective students – wow. They have implemented the LCMS (see above, and notes on the later session). Use of the portal still increasing.
University of Leeds
Recently acquired Luminis. Aiming to launch to students mid-2006. Currently on Luminis 3.x – looking for upgrade to Luminis 4 before going live. Have a ‘virtual’ team – from across Computing and Library. Have a VRE project, which include a ‘research portal’.
University of Manchester
First steps with uPortal. Still looking at a variety of possibilities for portal solutions. The potential user-base is large, and want to rollout for students (35,000) and research staff (6000) next year.
London Metropolitan
Currently working on student portal, although no definite decisions yet. A staff portal was previously mooted, but not implemented
Manchester Metropolitan
Business school – will pilot for about 6000 students. Oracle house mainly. WebCT, SAP Finance, .Net student records. Some JSR-168 experience from JISC project. Interested in content management, and single sign-on for document stores.
UWE
Pilot of uPortal – roughly 2000 students, with limited staff functionality. Developing portlets where possible, tying into web services. Looking to go into production to 25,000 students and 3000 staff in 2006/07
University of Liverpool
uPortal 2.2 in Summer 2005 (25,000 staff and students). Various integrations. Currently limited to about 200 concurrent users – not sure why. Use Oracle, Apache and Tomcat at backend. Quiet launch, but as soon as promoted it was overwhelmed by demand.
University of Ulster
Signed contract for Banner, looking at Luminis. Want to see consolidation of services, identity management is a big issue, going to deploy WebCT.