The Ongoing Saga

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The Ongoing Saga

• my.geneseo.eduYear 2
• Kirk M. Anne
• Paul Jackson
• John King
• Computing Information TechnologySUNY Geneseo

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About Geneseo

• A small public liberal arts college
• 5000 undergraduates, 200 faculty
• 48 undergraduate, 6 graduate programs
• 27 interdisciplinary minors
• A rural college
• 30 miles south of Rochester
• 70 miles east of Buffalo

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It was 4.5 years ago

• We received a CampusEAI application.
• Wouldnt it be great to get free stuff?
• Why should we do this?
• Bootstrap expertise
• Help push the issue through administration
• Follow best practices
• Work in a consortium
• Get free stuff

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The Process

• Filled out the application
• Got the grant
• Filled out the paperwork
• Thought the good thoughts
• Trained staff
• Focused on focus groups
• Pause Repeat
• Implemented the pilot
• Tweaked, rebuilt, released first version

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Think the good thoughts

• Why are you doing this?
• What purpose(s) does it serve?
• Can you support it?
• What do you need to support it?
• What are we focusing on?
• Who is your target audience(s)?

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Training/Support

• Take the time to train
• Learn how the system goes together
• Learn how to do it right
• Very specialized
• Hard to get off the street people
• Almost complete On the Job training
• Requires SA, DBA, Java/HTML experience
• No one person can fully support it

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Focus Groups

• Do NOT develop in a vacuum
• Learn what the audience(s) want
• Do NOT assume what they want
• Listen more than lead

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What do the kids want?

• Customization!
• Colors
• Fonts
• What they are presented

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What we rolled out

• SunFire v880 backend (OID)
• SunFire T1000 frontend (midtier/apps)
• Open to all faculty, students and staff
• Announced to 1st year students
• Gradual introduction to others
• Supported by
• Part time sysadmin (systems up and running)
• Part time DBA (checked/modified DB parameters)
• Part time/More than part time portlet developer

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Original Functionality

• SquirrelMail (embedded external app)
• Banner Self Service (external app)
• Weather portlet
• Campus Views
• Favorite Links
• Campus News
• Search Phonebook/Web
• Campus News
• Printing Balance
• Movie Times

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Added after initial startup

• Portal Feedback
• Portal Updates
• Holds (extract from Banner tables)
• Meal card info
• GPA calculator/Course List/Map
• Angel Hook
• Notepad
• Registration Time/Advisor info
• Student Opinion Forms for Instruction

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Screen Shots
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Feedback
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Feedback from 1st year

• 600 feedback messages
• All the stuff you need to have in one spot
• Now I can see my printer balance!
• Nice to have everything right there

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Other observations

• Its too slow
• We still dont know everything
• We tried a few things
• We found other things
• Oracle Cursors
• Feedback led to new development
• Hard to get stuff done when people leave
• Hard to get stuff done when there is too much

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Some Statistics

• Month view
• Week view
• Daily view (down time/compelling info)
• Average hits per day per user
• Top portlets used (maybe)

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Monthly Logins
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Weekly Logins
Labor Day Fall Start ?????? Spring Break Winter
Break Thanksgiving Fall Break Fall Start
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Daily Unique Users
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Daily Average Logins
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Developing for a Portal
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Development Environment

• Source Control (Subversion / CVS / etc)
• Compiler (Java SDK 1.4.2)
• IDE (JDeveloper / Eclipse)
• Portlet Standard (PDK / JSR 168)
• Packaging (EAR / WAR)

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Target Environment

• J2EE Runtime (OC4J / Tomcat)
• Portal Technology (Oracle Portal / uPortal)
• Deployment Process
• Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM)
• Distributed Configuration Management (DCM)
• Application Server
• Single Mid-tier Server
• Cluster

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Future Environment

• Eclipse IDE
• Convert portlets from PDK to JSR 168
• Build Box / Archive
• Shared Libraries
• Mid-tier Cluster and DCM
• More realistic test environment

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What Are We Doing?

• More Focus Groups
• Designing a New Layout
• Implementing New Portlets
• Investigating New Technologies

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Increase Coolness

• Configuration, configuration, configuration!
• Clean design and organization
• Custom colors and fonts (CSS)
• Rich User Interface
• Drag and Drop (a la iGoogle)
• Refreshing stale data

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More Information!

• Library (ILLIAD, Ex Libris, ERES)
• Room Reservations / Event Management
• Bus Schedules
• Academic Calendar
• Sports Calendar / Scores
• Performing Arts Calendar of Events
• World/Local news, Sports scores, RSS feeds
• Access to file servers on campus

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Interactive Content

• User Generated Content
• Discussion Forums
• Campus Photos / Live WebCams
• Social Networking
• Hooks into third-party systems
• MySpace/Facebook
• Hotmail/Gmail/YahooMail

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And one more thing
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Single Sign On (SSO)

• WebMail
• Banner Web Self Service
• Angel Learning Management
• SUNY Portal
• Deep linking would be really useful
• Leads to Identity Management issues

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Identity Management

• When we started, not a big deal.
• After we got going
• Portals can lead you into the big pit
• How do you create accounts?
• How do you grant permissions?
• How do you keep it right?
• Multiple dependencies make bigger catastrophes
  when ID mgmt fails

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Identity Management

• Lesson learned
• Added Oracle Calendar to our OID
• Slowed portal down for a few days
• Now, calendar fails when portal fails

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Hindsight is 20/20

• What could we have we done better?
• Involve more people sooner
• Remember the big picture goals
• Allocate the right resources
• Implement quickly after training
• Document process
• Use standards wherever possible

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Questions?