John Lewis's blog

EContent Magazine has published an interesting article "Enterprise Portals: Reborn and Transformed by the Social Web". Provides some good insights into what various people think is the future for enterprise portals.

Note: The article is not directly accessible to the public, but the link above is to a reprint on the Sapient web site.

Please enjoy this video from a recent webinar in which I provide a guided tour of Shibboleth.

Great news! Carl Jacobson has been named the CIO at U Delaware. Carl was the prime mover behind uPortal and obtained the initial Mellon grant for its development. He co-founded Jasig and was a founding board member of Sakai. Congratulations, Carl!

I am excited that Jasig is preparing applications for the Google Summer of Code this year. I think this will be a great opportunity to get some new work done on uPortal and CAS and to bring some new people into the developer community.

The United Kingdom government CIO Council has just published "Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan", taking a strong stance on a preference for open source technologies, communities, and business models.

Bruce Perens has a great new article over at Datamation yesterday entitled "How Many Open Source Licenses Do You Need?" I spend a fair amount of time working with projects and companies on their open source initiatives and on how they should manage them. Bruce has done an excellent job boiling down a lot of the decisions about licensing to a few simple choices.

The Nielsen Norman Group has released the 3rd edition of their study on the Usability of Intranet Portals. The analysis is based on 48 actual portal case studies and focuses on what works in real deployments. The 343 page report itself is well worth reading, and there are some nice highlights posted in the Executive Summary and in Jakob Nielsen's column about the study.

The "Break It Down" blog recently had an entry called "Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework? Or Maybe Not Java?" that uses a series of Google Trends queries to try to gauge the relative popularity of various web development frameworks.

I tend to dabble in a lot of different technologies (in case you hadn't noticed). One of the issues this creates is that I will frequently be away from something long enough that I don't have all the syntax fully memorized anymore and I spend time looking up reference documentation or old code samples to work on something new.

From the Desire2Learn Patent-Information Blog:

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard's claims.