Report to the JA-SIG Board

Report to the JA-SIG Board

Internationalization of the Organization

The Canadian universities have moved more quickly that the U.S. implementing uPortal. The Swedish universities are considering joint adoption, support, and extension of uPortal. They have a uPortal conference scheduled June 27-28. The IBS uPortal training session at the University of Nottingham was well attended. The University is planning a Portals 2002 conference July 1st. The Ministry of France continues its implementation of uPortal expecting to use it widely later this year. Several Chinese and Singapore universities are implementing or plan tol implement uPortal.

Sun Microsystems has supported uPortal presentations at the European Education and Research Conference in Milan—a breakout session with more than one-third of the 300+ attendees, the China Education and Research Conference in Beijing as a conference presentation to all 1,000 attendees, and in the forthcoming European University Information Systems Conference. Sun has also tentative agreed to support Peter Kharchenko and Justin Tilton meeting with Hong Kong and Singapore uPortal implementers.

There have been suggestions of a United Kingdom “JA-SIG,” an European JA-SIG, and a China JA-SIG. These could operate similar to the Northeast Region Meeting at Princeton that Carl Jacobson reported as productive.

uPortal 2.0

uPortal 2.0 was released and the first major bug-fix release version 2.1 will be released in the next few days.

uPortal 2.0 bugs have been identified and some have been resolved. There are sufficient unresolved bugs that CampusPipeline plans on a special effort at bug resolution in order to meet their scheduled dates for Beta in May and June or July release of their version of uPortal 2.

The release of version 2 has raised some concerns. One is performance, Bernie Gleason and Carl Jacobson have both asked for performance testing, and that is being scheduled for Sun Microsystems, likely in May. After the last two testing efforts, Peter and Ken declined to prepare a written document for release because of their concern about the accuracy of the results. I commented that we need a written document before the JA-SIG Conference.

There has been little end-user documentation on uPortal produced (compared to the suggested scope); not enough for the editing effort that Carl wanted to support. There is some discussion about how documentation should be done. Two developers have commented they will be able to author documentation. However, both have had high priority projects that have commanded their time so far.

Because of schedule, CampusPipeline may be forced into a documentation effort to support their version of uPortal. Likely their documentation would be available under their logo. CampusPipeline documentation would focus on administration and integration with their other products.

My concern is content. I still don’t see how Tier 3 Web masters or departmental Web authors will be able to use uPortal for content delivery with current tools and skills. CWebProxy appears to be the only technical approach, but its implementation and use is not simple.

The developers meeting in Albuquerque listed priorities for framework development, but the discussions began the transition of focus to channel development.

uPortal Partnerships and Relatiohships

Blackboard – One of the Blackboard representatives has reported that Blackboard will release a public document describing the use of uPortal by Blackboard clients. I am expecting this, as previously described, to be an RSS channel that transfer to the Blackboard portal. There has been considerably discussion of how to transfer authentication with a number of unresolved technical issues. I have provided a summary of questions that have arisen about the terms and conditions of licensing to Blackboard attorney Paul Terry suggesting Blackboard may wish to respond to these publicly.

Datatel – There is still no public announcement of uPortal use by Datatel. There is also mixed comments about whether Datatel will support Web services, which could be a vehicle for integration.

SCT – Although not documented, SCT said CampusPipeline is their portal of choice and integration is therefore a CampusPipeline responsibility.

U.S. Department of Education – JA-SIG Board Member Bernie Gleason will participate in a panel at the FSA (Federal Student Aid) CIO Update in Arlington, Virginia May 8th providing a campus perspective on information technology. FSA Champion for Privacy and Security Andy Boots is expected to talk about “transitive trust,” a design that relies on the college or university for authenticating staff and students (as contrasted to registering them with each of the three federal departments that exchange data). This responds to Bernie Gleason’s position that agencies should recognize the authentication of students and staff who are operating in the secure environment provided by portal or Web application.

At Carl’s suggestion, Indiana University’s Barry Walsh will participate and may comment on the future of Web services and its use for data exchanges with federal agencies. Florida State University CIO Larry Conrad will describe FSU’s vision for real-time student services.

In his presentation April 18th at the California Community Colleges Chief Information Systems Officers Association Annual Conference, FSA CIO Steve Hawald commented about interest in a pilot project for remote authentication following the “transitive trust” model. He named the University of California as a possible partner.

Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN) – CREN has asked to participate in the Department of Education’s pilot. In a letter to Commissioner Ziglar, CREN asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to honor CREN certificates for campus authentication.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has scheduled an April 29th Shibboleth briefing for the publication industry at New York University. In a meeting with Cliff Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), last week, he said the purpose of this meeting is to see whether publishers would be willing to implement Shibboleth or would prefer another solution for authentication and authorization. Following the CNI meeting last week, JSTOR’s Spencer Thomas commented the proposed ED solution could be supported if it were adopted by many colleges and universities.

Educause – For about a year I have been representing Educause at the XML Forum. By agreement, I reported on the activities of the XML Forum. I did not participate in any of the XML Forum discussions. Last month I suggested to Educause Vice-President Mark Luker that someone else could better represent Educause. In our meeting earlier in April, I told him that I could be in a position where it would be in the best interest of JA-SIG if I were to advocate a standard or to influence its deployment. Likely one or more of Educause’s vendor members would be uncomfortable with an Educause representative taking an active role. Mark agreed that replacing me could prevent some future criticism and appreciated my consideration. Although I did not mention the specific concern, I believe any implementation of SAML could jeopardize the market acceptance of Shibboleth.

JA-SIG Strategy: Issues and Opportunities

Although Carl has extended Mellon Foundation funding to the IBS development team, through June, he has been clear the focus should be on implementation and support. The delayed development of uPortal and its rapid acceptance have created a management issue: The amount of available resources is limited; the requested support is high.

Reviewing the implementation difficulties that are reported, uPortal appears to work well where there is experienced talent to both adapt it to the local environment and to resolve configuration issues. There are potential problems when a college or university expected it to be installed “out of the box” CampusPipeline is supporting uPortal for the top tier of customers, which includes a suite of products. Fees of $300,000 have been quoted for the suite. IBS has been offering installation and support services. Prices of $35,000 to $45,000 for installation and $15,000 per year for technical support have been quoted.

The Board may want to consider alternatives:

1.  Maintain a development environment and leave implementation and support to others. CampusPipeline and IBS may be examples of support organizations. IBM Web Sphere is an example for the Apache Foundation. If so, then a funding model for the development has to be considered. Based on experience to date, I would not expect CampusPipeline or IBS to contribute budget resources as IBM and others do for the Apache Foundation.

2.  Spin uPortal off to a commercial firm or a non-profit that supports IT products. The objective is to achieve economy of scale. This is the same issue that CREN faced with its ListProc product. The general recommendation was to spin ListProc off even though CREN has a funding model and customer base in place.

3.  Create a support organization, like a non-profit Red Hat. This would compete with the commercial services, but it may hold prices down. This alternative would require capital.

4.  Declare victory with uPortal 2.1 and let the market decide what to do with it.

uPortal has clearly established campuses can have portals without advertising; Bernie’s goal has been achieved. uPortal development has certainly extended knowledge of the technologies.

uPortal does have an important future role—establishing standards for higher education. uPortal will, for awhile, have sufficient market presence to establish, through selection, enhancement and extension, and deployment, standards in higher education. The University of Washington’s WebISO and its uPortal implementation may establish a single signon standard that the University of Washington could not itself establish. Collaboration with CREN and the U.S. Department of Education could create a remote authentication practice. The reconciliation of the OKI APIs, WSRP, and JSR 168 may create the “universal channel” for higher education. The Web services enhancement could lead to standard Web services data exchanges such as the Meteor Project envisioned. Establishing commonality is important to higher education—as Barry Walsh observes, but there is a cost and colleges and universities are already supporting a number of similar activities—Internet 2, Educasue, CREN, CNI, CLIB etc. With uPortal JA-SIG has a larger installed base than any of these much better funded efforts.

There was a suggestion that JA-SIG become involved in standards development, specifically participate in JSR 168. I have recommended that JA-SIG work with committee members on implementation opportunities rather than to take on responsibility for developing a standard. Participation requires dedicated resources with knowledge of the arcane standards making processes.

JA-SIG was originally founded to improve the information technology available to colleges and universities. A real project—uPortal—was the right effort at the right time. Now, looking over the summer conference program, as the Board of Directors suggested, the emphasis is on uPortal as a product. This winter the conference will return to Java and related technologies. This continues the focs on building the capacity to use Java on campus.

JA-SIG has had a North American focus; the Board may want to consider how colleges and universities in Asia, Europe, South America, and Africa would best be served, and provide guidance to leaders in these continents. Encouraging independent regional activities would be consistent with the JA-SIG objectives. The uPortal listservs would continue global collaboration.

jim farmer 5 April 23, 2002