Articles
March, 2019 Background and Overview Many current web applications provide some form of automated help and support for their customers. The value of this is two-fold. By providing an intuitive and high quality automated system, customers can self-serve many common questions without needing to wait for a person to provide the answers.
October, 2017 A new era in the story of Apereo uPortal is dawning: the era of uPortal 5. This new chapter brings many profound changes to uPortal. From my perspective, this new major version (version 5) is significantly more different from its precursor (version 4) than version 4 was from version 3. In fact, I would say this change (from 4 to 5) is more significant than any new major version since version 2.
October, 2017 As we explored earlier in this article series, "Separate Evolution of Two Systems" and "The Impact of Data on Student Success," disconnects between the two sides of campus computing, academic and administrative, can impact efforts to monitor and improve student success. And institutions today face mounting pressure to choose from a variety of solutions that help to mitigate or minimize this disconnect (see, "Possible Solutions"). Short of undertaking massive efforts to consolidate and centralize data systems for institutions, what is the best way to bridge the gap between existing systems in order to minimize negative impact?
September, 2017 In the first two articles of this series, "Separate Evolution of Two Systems" and "The Impact of Data on Student Success," we focused on the disconnect between the two sides of campus computing, academic and administrative, examining the impact of the separate evolution of these systems on student success. One of the most significant impacts of these compartmentalized systems is the difficulty to put data together to see a holistic picture of the student. Today, there is increasing awareness that a holistic view of student performance, based on accurate data, can positively impact student success.
June, 2017 This article is the second in the series, "Academic versus Administrative Computing: Bridging the Gap." Read the first article here: "Separate Evolution of Two Systems." If academic (LMS) and administrative (SIS) systems can coexist, each serving their own unique purpose, what's wrong with having different systems at the end of the day? There is certainly a good reason to keep a separation of concerns - why, for example, should learning systems have to worry about keeping track of a student's financial record or incoming test scores? Conversely, why should a back-end student information system (SIS) invest in keeping tabs on the student's learning experience?
March, 2017 Separate Evolution of Two Systems There's always been a disconnect between the two sides of campus computing: Academic and Administrative. Given the future needs of institutions, this gap will cause increasing difficulties as learning and records management become more intertwined.
June, 2015 Recently, Unicon has been engaging with a number of clients on cloud migrations. In some cases, those engagements have been focused on executing migrations to private or public clouds. In other cases, Unicon starts with the challenge of whether a service should be migrated to the cloud and if so, how far does that go - just the infrastructure or the management of the environment and services as well?
November, 2014 If you are currently using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), you might want to consider implementing Shibboleth instead. Shibboleth was specifically designed with higher education in mind. Both Shibboleth and ADFS were designed for enterprise application, but ADFS was designed with higher education as an afterthought.
November, 2013 This article is the latest in a long-running series on Unicon.net that covers basic uPortal installation for a local development environment. Its content is pretty close to previous versions, but has been edited and updated to reflect changes in the newest version.