Blogs

Here's something you really should know if you use the MS SQL Server database platform and you're considering an upgrade to uPortal 3: you will need to enable the ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION and READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT options in your portal database. If you don't enable them, you'll encounter a nasty issue in the area of portlet preferences.

I write to congratulate Scott Battaglia of Rutgers University and the other CAS developers on the successful release of JASIG CAS Server 3.3.

Over the past few months, I've had the pleasure, once again, of working with Johns Hopkins University on their uPortal system. This effort reinforced my earlier conclusions about the folks at JHU: talented people with great attitudes.

uPortal 3 ships with an attractive UI for adding content to a page, adjusting the layout of a page, and moving portlets around within a defined layout for a page. This blog post walks through these features and presents them with screen shots.

In which I describe uPortal's support for permissioning, using access control on technical information about error conditions as an example.

Someone asked me recently whether I think uPortal is a good platform for delivering a self-service portal. My answer is that it is, and in this blog post I explain why and give examples of how it has already been used to deliver such experiences.

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

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.

This is just a roll up of a few links about uPortal on www.unicon.net.

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.