Millikin University Profiled in JASIG Newsletter

I found the Millikin University community profile in the July 2008 JASIG newsletter to be a worthwhile and heartening read.

It's an impressive story of a few talented university IT staff members without significant prior Java experience succeeding with uPortal.

I especially like the line "the implementation was very interesting, and has been an awesome learning experience". Besides being a concrete software platform for implementing campus portals, uPortal and the organization JASIG are an opportunity to collaborate, to grow, and to mutually support and engage one another in the delivery of information technology in higher education. I'm pleased to see uPortal succeed technically here as a platform integrating with Novell eDirectory, GroupWise, Banner self-serve, Jira, Moodle, TouchNet bill payment, and Novell iPrint, among other applications. I'm also pleased to see it succeed socially in growing higher education IT staff members and their working relationships.

Whenever he would find an error message or a problem, he would do research (primarily on Google and the JA-SIG website,) and would be able to resolve it, sometimes after a few minutes, sometimes after a few days.

People sometimes perceive a lack of documentation in uPortal as a portal platform, I think because of a lack of formal documentation. While it's true that uPortal as a project doesn't invest a lot of effort in delivering polished PDF manuals, it's also true that people looking for answers tend to find them, on the email lists, in the email archives, in Unicon's publicly available knowledge base, in blog posts, on the web, or yes, sometimes even in the formal documentation.

I like the Millikin story quite a bit. It shows that positive working relationships between schools, positive attitudes, and perspicacity are more important in composing a successful uPortal project than is mere pre-existing Java expertise.

I wish to convey my public congratulations to Chris Myers and RJ Podeschi on their success in implementing uPortal and my thanks to JASIG Executive Director Jonathan Markow for bringing this news to the newsletter and to Mark Rogers for his continual volunteer excellence in pulling the newsletter together every month.