Unicon Announces uPortal 3 Commercial Support
Phoenix, AZ - May 5, 2008 - Unicon, Inc., the leading provider of open source enterprise portals, applications, and top end technology consulting for higher education, today announced commercial support for uPortal 3, the next generation community source portal platform designed by and for the higher education community. uPortal 3 includes numerous new features, updated technologies, and platform enhancements, and also incorporates current best practices in enterprise Java. Unicon was directly involved with many of the architectural developments and contributions to uPortal 3, and has a dedicated team of uPortal administration and development specialists to provide comprehensive consulting, training, and support for institutions using uPortal or who wish to migrate to uPortal 3.
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’s work has also resulted in many significant development, technology, and feature contributions to the uPortal platform and community including most recently a project with Johns Hopkins University to enhance mobility in uPortal.
"Unicon has been active in the uPortal project since its early beginnings," said Jonathan Markow, JA-SIG Executive Director. "As a JA-SIG Commercial Affiliate providing well-rounded support for our products, we are very gratified to see them offering services for uPortal 3. Unicon's skills, experience, and contributions to uPortal make them particularly well qualified to provide commercial support to our community."
New in uPortal 3.0
New theme and skin provide fresh and attractive look for uPortal 3.
Enhancements make it easier to customize the look of uPortal. Skinning done entirely with CSS.
Default content set to demonstrate portal’s key features.
Comprehensive import/export scripts make it easier to upgrade to the latest version of uPortal.
New portlet support using the Pluto 1.1 container allows uPortal to more readily support JSR 286, the more versatile and powerful Portlet 2.0 standard, once it has been finalized.
A Maven-based project structure and build process is now standard, providing robust build, reporting and packaging tools.
Core components of the framework have been migrated to the Spring Java Development Framework, making it simpler for developers to work with uPortal.
The migration to Spring also serves to significantly reduce the amount of underlying code.
With the widespread adoption of JA-SIG CAS for authentication, CAS is now configured as the default authentication system for uPortal.
A unified caching framework provides multiple cache implementation options including clusterable and distributable caches.
Remote management using JMX makes it easier to monitor performance and troubleshoot problems.
About Unicon's Cooperative Support Program for uPortal
Participation in the program enables institutions to access the support services and also funds a dedicated support and development team. Support issues are managed on a priority basis with an escalation mechanism available for high priority issues. All development work performed by the team will be undertaken in direct participation with the uPortal community. The Cooperative Support Program for uPortal is a strong complement to Unicon’s professional services for uPortal 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. More information is available at: www.ja-sig.org.
