Johns Hopkins University Selects Unicon to Develop uPortal Mobile for Campus & Students
Upon Project Completion, Johns Hopkins will Donate New Mobility Framework Back to uPortal Open Source Community
Phoenix, AZ - April 21, 2008 - Unicon, Inc., the leading provider of open source enterprise portals, applications, and top end technology consulting for higher education, today announced it has been chosen by Johns Hopkins University to develop and deploy its new mobility theme based on uPortal, the open source enterprise portal for higher ed. The mobility theme is designed to enhance the functionality and content of its campus portal to make it accessible by mobile devices such as cell phones, SmartPhones, and PDAs and more useful to students, faculty, and administrators. The mobility development work and testing is scheduled to be completed and go live in the summer of 2008. Johns Hopkins University plans to donate the mobile development work back to the uPortal open source community.
Mobility is a way of life for many of our students, faculty, and administrators, as well as the worldwide general public. As a forward-looking institution for higher learning, it is important for us to evolve and keep pace with the sociological and technological changes occurring in the real world,” said Theron Feist, Senior Enterprise Developer, Johns Hopkins University. “We’re happy to be working with Unicon to create the necessary enhancements that will significantly increase the accessibility and functionality of our campus portal to mobile users.”
“Unicon is excited to be working with Johns Hopkins to help create and implement their uPortal mobility theme on campus,” said John C. Blakley, CEO of Unicon, Inc. “But in addition to adding value for their campus-wide portal users, Johns Hopkins should also be recognized and commended for the importance of their contribution to the uPortal, open source, and academic communities for their future donation of the mobility technology when this project is completed.”
About Unicon & uPortal
Since 1999, Unicon’s consulting group has provided over 150 colleges and universities with uPortal and related services and support for their online campus deployments. Unicon has also made significant development, technology, and feature contributions to the uPortal platform and community. The Cooperative Support Program for uPortal from Unicon is a strong complement to their professional services, which include various bundled services comprised of implementation, project planning, installation, configuration, branding, and training components. Under this program, all development work for new features, fixes, and enhancements is donated back to the uPortal community.
About uPortal
From the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG), uPortal is an open source enterprise portal collaboratively developed by higher-education, for higher-education. Utilizing Java, Extensible Markup Language (XML), JavaServer Pages Technology (JSP) and Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technologies, the uPortal framework enables easy, standards-based integration with authentication and security applications, single sign on secure access, and end user customization. Now gaining favor worldwide, uPortal is one of the more widely-used portal technologies for higher education in the United States. The group is hosting its 17th Annual JA-SIG Spring 2008 Conferenceat the end of April 2008.
