Unicon Chief Software Architect John A. Lewis Named to JASIG Board of Directors

Phoenix,AZ - August 6, 2008 - Unicon, Inc., the leading provider of open source enterprise portals, applications, and top end technology consulting for higher education, today announced its Chief Software Architect John A. Lewis has been named to the JASIG Board of Directors.
Unicon is a founding JASIG Commercial Affiliate and has provided over 150 colleges and universities with open source enterprise portals, applications, and related services and support for online campus deployments. The company specializes in delivering enterprise-class services for the JASIG uPortal platform, the JASIG CAS single sign-on framework, the Sakai learning management system, and the Zimbra next-generation messaging and collaboration software – all open source technologies.

"The JASIG board is very pleased to welcome John Lewis as a new board director," said JASIG's executive director Jonathan Markow. "John's industry expertise, open source experience, and deep knowledge of JASIG and its projects make him particularly well qualified to serve in this role. John's election by the JASIG membership is also testimony to the many contributions he has already made to our community.".

“I am thrilled at the opportunity to further contribute to the JASIG community by serving on the Board of Directors,” said John Lewis. “JASIG has charted the course for community-based open source enterprise software in higher education and continues to be very relevant today. As a member of the JASIG Board of Directors, I will continue to support initiatives for improving the membership program, strategically using JASIG funds, and forging stronger relationships with other enterprise open source communities like Sakai, Kuali, and Apache.”

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 v2.5, or who wish to migrate to uPortal 3. Unicon also supports uPortal and the open source community through software code contributions and through active participation and speaking engagements at conferences.

Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program is a commercial, service level agreement (SLA) driven support program that provides subscribing institutions with many benefits including a predictable cost support solution. The program provides a dedicated team of expert uPortal developers and support engineers for direct technical assistance. All development work performed by the team is contributed back to the uPortal project and shared with the entire community.

John A. Lewis Bio

As Chief Software Architect, John is primarily responsible for developing the technology strategy of Unicon's solutions portfolio for higher education. John is a 16 year veteran of the software engineering industry with expertise in large-scale enterprise architectures, open source technology, and agile software development methods. His team helps seamlessly integrate the latest technologies into Unicon’s world class solutions and services for higher education. John is a regular speaker at national and international conferences on enterprise open source technologies in higher education. John has been a long-time advocate and contributor in the open source software community. He is the lead developer of Spring Portlet MVC, the JSR 168 Java Portlet development framework that is part of the wildly popular Spring Framework project. He is also active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai.

About uPortal

From JASIG, uPortal is an open source enterprise portal collaboratively developed by higher-education, for higher-education. Utilizing the Java Platform, Extensible Markup Language (XML), Java Server Pages (JSP) and other Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) 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 most widely-used portal technologies for higher education in the United States. More information is available at www.uportal.org