About uPortal

In order to remain competitive, institutions must continue to deliver innovative approaches to teaching and learning.  Limited resources and shrinking budgets are quickly putting proprietary software options out of reach.  This dilemma has caused institutions to come together and create open source solutions for higher education, such as Jasig's uPortal framework.

What is uPortal?

uPortal is the leading open source enterprise portal framework built by and for the higher education community. uPortal continues to evolve through contributions from its global community and is supported by resources, grants, donations, and memberships fees from academic institutions, commercial affiliates, and non-profit foundations. uPortal is built on open standards-based technologies such as Java and XML, and enables easy, standards-based integration with authentication and security infrastructures, single sign-on secure access, campus applications, web-based content, and end user customization. It is one of the most widely deployed open source enterprise portal frameworks, having been adopted by hundreds of institutions and the eResearch community, world wide.

Click here to download the white paper: Enterprise Portals: What are They?

History of uPortal

In 2001, a group of 20 institutions, including Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Delaware, University of British Columbia, Cal Poly, Columbia, Holy Cross, Georgetown, and Boston College, recognized the need to protect the institutional image, to exploit the potential of the portal, and to promote the use of Java technology.  Under the sponsorship of Sun Microsystems, these institutions formed the Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JASIG), now Jasig (no longer called Java in Administration Special Interest Group).  Securing a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, volunteers from Interactive Business Solutions (a company subsequently acquired by Unicon, Inc.) and the participating institutions developed a free and open source portal focused on the use cases of higher education.  The uPortal project has enjoyed considerable success with over 600 production deployments, and remains the most widely used open source portal in higher education.

What is Jasig?

Jasig is a consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates sponsoring open source software projects for higher education, fostering collaboration within and among communities of practice. Jasig is a non-profit 501(c)3 membership organization organizing conferences in support of open source software design, development, and implementation. Jasig provides hosting and representation for several open source projects including uPortal and Central Authentication Service (CAS) .

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