Something new to play with
10 September 2008While playing around with Kuali Rice, I stumbled across the Kuali Student Services System (KS), where I ran into the portal product that they were using, uPortal. According to the uPortal home page:
uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education. This group sees an institutional portal as an abridged and customized version of the institutional Web presence… a “pocket-sized” version of the campus Web. Portal technology adds “customization” and “community” to the campus Web presence. Customization allows each user to define a unique and personal view of the campus Web. Community tools, such as chat, forums, survey, and so on, build relationships among campus constituencies.
uPortal is an open-standard effort using Java, XML, JSP and J2EE. It is a collaborative development project with the effort shared among several of the JA-SIG member institutions. You may download uPortal and use it on your site at no cost.
I downloaded the Developers Quick Start version from their download page, which comes complete with a Tomcat application server and an embedded HSSQLDB database, extracted the files, ran the ant task to fire things up, and then pointed my browser to the specified URL. I have to say that it was pretty slick. The demo includes a few variations of stakeholder logins, and signing on with each one gives you a slightly different look. I’ve just started to play around with it, but I have to say that, so far at least, I like it.
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