Conversation with the JA-SIG Board

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Conversation with the JA-SIG Board
Ted Dodds University of British Columbia Ian
Dolphin University of Hull Patty Gertz Princeton
University Mark Mara Cornell University
Jonathan Markow Columbia University William G.
Thompson, Jr. Rutgers University Barry
Walsh Indiana University
December 5th 2005
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JA-SIG What Defines Us

• JA-SIG is Community and Collaboration among
  Higher Ed institutions world-wide
• JA-SIG supports its community through knowledge
  sharing
• JA-SIG is Developers, Managers, Content
  Providers, Vendors
• JA-SIG sponsors Open Source projects
• JA-SIG partners with vendors and the extended
  community to foster new Open Source business
  models for higher ed

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JA-SIG Activities

• Conferences
• Clearinghouse
• Partnerships
• Projects
• HyperContent
• CAS
• uPortal
• Futures

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JA-SIG Clearinghouse

• A common place for software that is considered to
  be of general use to the community
• Machine is owned by the JA-SIG. ja-sig.org and
  uportal.org are owned by the JA-SIG.
• Collaboration tools
• Jira for issues tracking
• Confluence for discussions surrounding our
  sanctioned products
• Luntbuild for nightly builds
• Fisheye Source code visualization tool

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JA-SIG Clearinghouse

• Home for CVS, JA-SIG and uPortal websites, and
  conference software
• Clearinghouse Application currently has 1490
  members, 56 contributions. This is a vehicle for
  making contributions to the community.

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JA-SIG HyperContent

• June, 2005 v.2.0. Runs standalone without a
  portal requirement
• Only dependencies are Java SDK 1.4, servlet
  engine, and hard disk.
• Highly customizable enhanced ease of
  use/navigation.
• Full multi-server transaction support at level of
  individual files, such as XML documents,
  serialized objects, etc.
• Projects can define custom workflows, groups and
  permissions, in addition to their own assets and
  processing pipelines.

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JA-SIG CAS 3.0

• Centralized Web Authentication
• Proxy Authentication / Delegated Authority
• Interoperability
• Java, JSP, PL/SQL, ASP, Apache, PAM, Perl, Zope,
  WebObjects, ColdFusion, Acegi, CAS Generic
  Handler
• CASifying Applications
• Sakai, Oracle Calendar, Oracle Portal, Oracle
  Financials,...
• CASified Applications
• uPortal, Mantis, pNews, Sympa, TikiWiki

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JA-SIG CAS 3.0

• CAS 3.0.2 is the current production ready release
• CAS 3 is 100 backward compatible with CAS 2.0
  clients
• CAS 3 running in production at JA-SIG and Rutgers
• UConn, Case Western Reserve planned deployments
  this year
• ESUP-Portail to incorporate CAS 3 in their
  distribution in early 2006

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JA-SIG Futures

• New Sponsorships
• New Community Source Initiatives
• Enterprise Service Bus
• Community Source SIS
• Sustainability

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Enterprise Service Bus Wikipedia

• It requires the clear separation of message
  headers and message body
• It is usually operating system and language
  independent it should work between Java and .NET
  applications, for example
• It (often) uses XML and Web services to transport
  messages
• It includes adapter standards (such as J2C) for
  incorporating existing applications into the bus
• It includes support for asynchronous processing

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Enterprise Service Bus Wikipedia

• It includes intelligent, content-based routing
• It includes a standardized security model to
  authorize, authenticate and audit use of the ESB
• It includes transformation services (such as
  XSLT) between the format of the sending
  application and the receiving application,
  including the transformation of data formats

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Enterprise Service Bus Wikipedia

• It includes validation against schemas for
  sending and receiving messages
• It can uniformly apply business rules, enrichment
  of the message from other sources, splitting and
  combining of multiple messages, and the handling
  of exceptions
• It can conditionally route or transform messages
  based on a central policy
• It is monitored for message latency and other
  characteristics described in a Service Level
  Agreement

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Enterprise Service Bus Wikipedia

• It (often) facilitates service classes,
  responding appropriately to higher and lower
  priority users
• It supports queuing, holding messages if
  applications are temporarily unavailable
• It handles a publish and subscribe messaging
  model, including event handling

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Enterprise Service Bus

• OneStart Workflow
• Mediated activities
• Process spawns
• Individual initiates
• Some next steps
• Greater simplification for participating apps
• Process to Process
• Next stage of evolution
• ESB

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Community Source SIS

• Time is right for the next generation
• Records Information Services
• SIS becomes Student Services System
• Exceptionally configurable
• Not best practice your practice
• Rethinking underlying architecture
• Identity, Workflow, Rules

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Community Source SIS

• Build on growing maturity of community source
  model
• Small, committed core group with skin in the game
• Project framework, priority setting
• Just beginning a planning process
• Further information
• UBC presentation today at 1130
• IBM White Paper

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uPortal

• Strategic Direction
• Health and Sustainability
• Project Liaison
• Community Development
• Sakai/Mellon funding ends 12/05
• uPortal 3.0 shifts back to community process
• Roadmap
• Engage existing and future uPortal adopters
• Expected release at JA-SIG Summer conference in
  Vancouver, June 2006

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• QUESTIONS

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uPortal Development

• Funding for the last two years of research and
  development on the next generation uPortal has
  been made possible by our partnership with the
  Sakai project and through a generous Mellon
  Foundation grant. This work has made significant
  progress on the next generation uPortal and has
  had considerable impact on improving the current
  production version. The initial grant expires at
  the end of this year and the responsibility of
  charting a path for the uPortal 3.x branch and
  the next generation uPortal shifts to the uPortal
  community process.

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uPortal Strategic Direction

• The JA-SIG Board is committed to ensuring the
  health and sustainability of its sponsored
  projects and for providing strategic direction
  that is consistent with our stated purpose and
  the needs of the community and our commercial
  partners. The role of Project Liaison is the
  primary way the Board executes this
  responsibility. The Project Liaison maintains
  close relationship with project leaders and
  commercial partners and is the single point of
  contact for the JA-SIG Board and project
  stakeholders. Bill Thompson is currently serving
  as Project Liaison for the uPortal project.

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uPortal Development Roadmap

• JA-SIG is committed to providing strategic
  direction for uPortal that is consistent with our
  stated purpose and the needs of the community and
  our commercial partners. JA-SIG is now moving
  forward to gather requirements that will guide
  the next generation of uPortal. Over the next
  six months and in partnership with the uPortal
  community we will merge requirements identified
  as part of the Sakai/uPortal grant project with
  those identified by working with the current and
  future uPortal users, both commercial and
  institutional. This effort will result in a
  uPortal Development Roadmap and expected to be
  released at the Vancouver JA-SIG meeting is in
  June, 2006.