uPortal/CAS Show and Tell

What would the beginning of the school year be without a “here’s what we did this summer” show and tell?

I had the pleasure of managing two distinctly different, yet oftentimes similar, uPortal/CAS projects this summer. These projects were for Fort Lewis College and Sacramento State, and both recently wrapped up successfully.

Fort Lewis College

Fort Lewis College is a public liberal arts school located in Durango, Colorado, with an enrollment of approximately 3,900 undergraduate students. Fort Lewis College (FLC) chose to deploy a portal to create a one-stop-shop for students first, with future plans to incorporate staff/faculty. The high-level plan for the FLC uPortal implementation consisted of uPortal 3.0, CAS, Email SSO, Banner SSO, and Moodle SSO, a handful of interesting portlets, and a few skins.

We kicked off the FLC implementation with an Implementation Planning Session in May – just as it was getting really hot in Arizona, I got to spend a week in the beautiful mountains of Colorado! After the session, Unicon proceeded with FLC’s services - installations of uPortal, CAS, and a few portlets, Moodle and Outlook CASification, training, and branding. In parallel, FLC’s portal staff worked hard on the overall setup, configuration, and customization of the site, as well as Banner CASification (they made good use of community networking, receiving help from Southern Utah) and implemented additional skins.

Unicon worked closely with the FLC team during the summer and wrapped up the consulting work in August, just before FLC’s fall semester go-live. The following screenshots show a public view and an authenticated student view of FLC’s branded portal, “The Fort” (a nickname given to the College by its students). Notice the change in skin on the authenticated view.

Sacramento State

California State University, Sacramento, nicknamed Sacramento State, has an enrollment of approximately 28,000 students in 60 undergraduate and 40 graduate programs. Sacramento State’s plan for uPortal was to replace an existing campus portal; thus, Sac State chose to brand its portal “My Sac State 2.0”. Like FLC’s, Sac State’s list of to-dos was long – including uPortal 2.6, CAS, Email SSO, Peoplesoft SSO, WebCT/Bb SSO, a handful of portlets, and custom branding.

Sac State had the particular challenge of making sure services previously available in the original portal version were not removed in version 2.0. Of benefit to Sac State was the knowledge sharing it was able to do with its sister campuses to learn uPortal hints and tips, including the quick path to successful Peoplesoft integration. Sac State looked to Unicon for overall consulting and mentoring, rather than a lot of hands on work. The one hands-on coding project Unicon completed was a CAS modification that has since been donated to the CAS community.

Throughout the project, Sac State found opportunities to learn from Unicon’s experience in topics such as PAGS mentoring, performance testing, skinning, Subversion, and on and on. Sac State is currently live to a portion of its campus, and will be fully live within the next few weeks. The following screenshots show My Sac State 2.0 – a public view and an authenticated student view.

Final Grade

Over the course of both projects, 10+ Unicon consultants were involved in mentoring, installation, development, and branding efforts. Unicon had a strong partnership with both clients to achieve project objectives. The final sites showcased above are the results of many hours of hard work by each client and by Unicon staff. We expect both FLC and Sac State to be significant contributors to furthering the uPortal and CAS open source projects.

A+!