gla.isisp/isisp/portals-bp/2003-07-14/1

DRAFT

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Portals: examples of best practice

James Currall

July 2003

Contents

Introduction

This document collects together a number of examples of portals in universities. The three US examples are chosen because they allow some form of guest access, that allows people experience what a portal is like. These examples are all listed in the extensive tutorial material at the Provosts on Portals web site at :- http://faculty.weber.edu/portals/. In addition, the most frequently cited example of good practice in the UK is the LSE portal, LSE for You.

University of Delaware (UD&me)

Background

The main page combines a calendar, streamed content and bookmarks. This is a good example of how different parts of a web portal page may be configured. Parts of it can be tried out at:- http://uportal.udel.edu/student/. In February they had 3500 students using the portal, heading for a final audience of 15,000 undergraduates.

How does it work?

This Portal is constructed using the JA-SIG open source uPortal framework (http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/) running on a SUN Fire 280R server. The dedicated portal data is stored in an Oracle database running on a Sun Ultra 450 server, but much of the student records information is harvested from old IBM mainframe.

What is Available?

The portal home page has a number of channels of information under three tabs:-

Today at UD
general information: news, events, weather, searching, small ads and personalisable bookmarks.

Academics
general and more personalised information relating to: course catalogue, academic advisors, course registration, course of study, timetable, exams, results, transcripts, library books on loan, class announcements, etc.

Finances
all aspects of finance and related non-academic activities: payment of accounts, requesting refunds, billing, financial aid, student addresses, housing assignment, etc.

Information is organised around a number of areas of activity related to the ‘student life-cycle’ rather than the university organisational structure:-

LSE for You

Background

In 2002 LSE for You was awarded the UCISA Award for Excellence and the EUNIS Elite award. The system has additionally was short listed for the Computer Industry Awards in October 2002. It is seen by many in the UK as being an exemplar in successful deployment, although more recently the deployment of modules implementing aspects of academic process have been less well received by academics than the earlier modules were by students and admin staff. There is no guest access to this portal, but further details may be found in the presentation at:- http://www.learninfonet.ac.uk/case_studies/LSE%20Case%20Study.pdf. In a sense, the main focus of LfY is to provide a web front end to the major admin systems at LSE.

How does it work?

The LSE for You portal interface is accessed from the main LSE website and its basic principles are relatively simple: a browser makes a call to a Java servlet, (called the LfY servlet), which carries out a number of functions (listed below) before compiling a page and returning the output to the browser:

Behind the scenes, Java Servlets running on the LfY web server make requests of the admin system databases which are based on the Oracle database and return the required data which is assembled to provide a meaningful presentation of the information to the user request.

What is Available?

The following modules were available in 2002:

University of California Los Angeles (MyUCLA)

Background

Some of the features include area traffic information, the campus online newspaper and the ability of users to choose colour themes and layouts. You can visit this portal at:- http://my.ucla.edu/, from the guest access choose the “Sample student session” to see the facilities available..

How does it work?

MyUCLA runs on an Intel Pentium based multi-processor Hewlett Packard server running Microsoft Windows NT. Web services are provided by Microsoft’s Internet Information Server using Microsoft Active Server Pages. Authentication is achieved using ActiveX components that call the UCLA Administrative Information Services authentication server, page content is dynamically generated from information queried from Microsoft SQL database servers located in the College of Letters and Science and Office of the Registrar.

What is Available?

In the student portal, the following five tabs:-

give access to the following range of facilities:-

University of Washington (MyUW)

Background

MyUW is a portal to University of Washington information. It is a tool for finding the resources need to fulfil an individual’s roles at the university. It can be “personalised” to fit an individual’s needs by including or excluding services, adding bookmarks to favourite links, and choosing the background and accent colours preferred. This is an entirely text-based approach and uses tabs to allow users to move from one information grouping to the next. To try it out at:- http://myuw.washington.edu/, choose “Enter as a guest”.

How does it work?

MyUW is a Web application that accesses a variety of databases to bring the user a personalized view of the University of Washington World Wide Web pages. The system can be composed into four logical components: the web server, the web client, the database servers, and supporting programs. MyUW is currently running on eight IBM RS/6000 machines - all of which are running IBM’s AIX operating system.

The web server software is Apache and Apache Jserv which is a tool to run Java servlets on the web server The MyUW servlets obtain a variety of data from a number of database sources including:-

What is Available?

There are four different views:-

The student view has five tabs:-

Prepared by: James Currall

Last modified on: Monday 14 July 2003