uPortal at the April JA-SIG Conference

I'm very pleased to see that the upcoming JA-SIG conference will have many seminars and presentations well-aligned with the uPortal project and the needs of uPortal deployers. I look forward to this conference and to being able to attend many of these presentations.

The next JA-SIG conference April 27th through 30th in St. Paul, Minnesota will feature a great deal of uPortal-aligned content. Immediately before and after the conference available in-depth seminar topics include introductory and advanced instruction on developing with Spring Portlet MVC, writing JavaScript for portlets (that will actually work and play well with others' javascripty portlets), migrating from one uPortal environment and version to another, and an introduction to installing and customizing uPortal. During the conference itself, sessions will include a presentation of uPortal 3 by lead uPortal developer Eric Dalquist, Cris Holdorph presenting Sakai and uPortal integration options, Adam Rybicki presenting an introduction to CAS (which feature will ship with uPortal 3!), John Lewis presenting the exciting new and now finally released JSR-286 specification and describing how to secure portlets using Spring Security, Chris Doyle of Johns Hopkins and Unicon's own Drew Wills presenting on the Johns Hopkins uPortal upgrade experience, Andy Gherna of the University of Illinois and Unicon's Drew Wills presenting on managing uPortal deployments, Gary Thompson, designer and incidentally this website's editor, explaining how to theme and skin uPortal 3, Chris Awre of the University of Hull on personal repository spaces in personal portal experiences, Tim Carroll of the University of Illinois on advanced DLM (uPortal layout management) pipeline extensions, a panel on portlet development, and Erik Olsson presenting on developing uPortal themes.

These are just most of the particularly uPortal-aligned content -- there's also presentations about and around several other community source projects and initiatives at this conference. JA-SIG conferences are veritable treasure-troves of surprisingly affordable conference activity that supports and sustains the uPortal project.