MyJH News/Updates December 1, 2005 - Johns Hopkins has such a vast variety of applications, content and services but very little is done to consolidate and unify the resources to assist users in getting access. Realizing that existing resources are not being used to their maximum potential, two portal committees were established: Functional Portal Group, and the Technical Portal Working Group. These two groups were tasked with developing a portal strategy, defining the requirements and selection of technologies to be used. The Functional Portal Group has been lead by Sayeed Choudhury (MSEL-DKC); the Technical Portal Working Group has been co-lead by Xuemao Wang (MSEL) and Dwight Raum (IT @ Hopkins).
In fall of 2005, the Technical Portal Working Group settled on a 'reference portal' strategy. The reference portal strategy boils down to two key points: 1) Standards for interoperability (interop). Because there are several other portals and a myriad of strong web presence in existence with Hopkins, the group determined that trying to establish a central/singular Enterprise Portal was probably far fetched. Instead, it was determined that sharing of channels (sometimes called portlets) was really most important. The best way to achieve interoperability of the channels was to standardize on Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and JSR-168. Core to integration of services is the use of a common authentication technology - this has been achieved by using Computer Associate's SiteMinder ( please see http://it.jhu.edu/JHED/JHEA for more information about Enterprise Authentication ).
2) Portal of last resort. Though there are some very good portals and website already in existence, there are still many more schools, departments, centers and groups who desire to have a portal presence, but lack the financial and technical resources to implement a portal of their own. For these purposes, the reference portal could be used.
uPortal (www.uportal.org), an open source higher-education portal was selected to implement the reference portal. In addition to having many deployments in many peer institutions, uPortal is key to a number of forthcoming initiatives such as Sakai. Peer institutions have also developed a library of channels for ready deployment into uPortal. Starting March of 2005, MSEL and Enteprise services jointly developed a pilot implementation of uPortal 2.42. This pilot was done as a proof-of-concept exhibiting the integration of uPortal with JHED and Enterprise Authentication (SiteMinder). After proving that uPortal could be integrated with the Enterprise, MSEL and enterprise Services jointly began the development of the reference portal, with a focus on delivering a Homewood UnderGraduate portal by September 2005. Input for the Homewood Undergraduate portal was solicited from students (and will continue to be) and from several homewood deans. Though the Johns Hopkins Portal (https://portal.johnshopkins.edu) has been available since late September, it has not been released to full production yet (there are still some technical and non-technical issues to work through). Work continues on the reference portal; the Portal Technical Group is now in the early stages of gathering requirements for the 'part-time schools', with the intent to expand its audience to include AAP, EPP and SPSBE.
As previously mentioned, the production portal - https://portal.johnshopkins.edu is available. We are actively working to bring services in such as JHEM email, Calendaring, and Jshare Web File sharing. It is fully integrated with JHED and Enterprise Authentication, thought because it is in a quasi-production state authentication is actually sequentially tried against the production JHED directory and the test JHED directory (JHEDjr). Most of the JHED Web functionality has been ported into uPortal (login and see the MyJHED tab) too.
Portal Architecture The Johns Hopkins Portal is built using the following technologies: The Technical Working Group attempts to meet quarterly to discuss progress and technologies. For more details, the working group maintains a Wiki site here: https://wiki.library.jhu.edu/display/PTECHWG/Home
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