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Dive into the realm of enterprise portals in higher education, their implementation, best practices, and the complex evaluations involved in deploying such systems. Uncover the intricacies of portal architecture, business cases, and support models within the educational sector.
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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 Platform • Web Server • Application Server • Development Environment • Database engine • Authentication/Authorization • Legacy & 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/portals • Narrow 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 HMTL • E-clips “webscrape” content • Tools to pipe E-clipse to customize content,pages • Text search, retrieval, spider engine • Role-based access model • Prototype pages up
Sequoia • XML-based content access & delivery • plugins for HTML, POP • MS Message queues to manage requests • Scale through modularity • COM interfaces • Non-trivial implementation (infrastructure overhead)
Evaluation Plan • Deploy simple portal • Demonstrate user access/customization • Implement business function • e.g. Employee benefits • Meet with constituent groups • Evaluate cost/benefit