Thank you for checking into the first installment of my blog. In the first edition, I am going to talk about the Portal Infrastructure Replacement Project, known as PIRP.
First, some history. In the Summer of 2006, in explicit acknowledgment of the shortcomings of "Manegate's" portal infrastructure, LMU IT applied for a grant sponsored by the CampusEAI Consortium. I'm going to get a little wonky, so if you aren't concerned with some lower-level techno-babble, move along. When the portal product was sold to LMU, there was an understanding that the product integrated with our existing directory structure, Microsoft's Active Directory (the place that holds your LMU Student or LMU Main domain user id and password). It turns out that it did not natively integrate with our directory. To accomplish this required a customization. So, the roll-out of the initial platform included a customization. (You may or may not know but, in general, customizations = bad..sometimes necessary, but very infrequently do they yield goodness). Why was a customization needed? The portal platform that was purchased was relatively new to market and did not have natively built into it connections to Active Directory. Additionally, the portal platform that purchased was extremely proprietary, which means that it was difficult to add onto it any additional functionality without costing LMU big bucks...
Well, you say, clearly the company must have acknowledged this shortcoming and upgraded its product line. In fact, they did!!! But it was expensive to upgrade...Really expensive...Really, really expensive. In addition to this, the customizations and closed-nature of the portal had created a breach of faith between the vendor and LMU IT.
So, this is why in the Summer of 2006, LMU IT applied for and received a materials and services grant that is worth over (putting pinkie to mouth) ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!! (Sadly, Mini-Me was not included as part of the grant). So, in essence, we were applying for an opportunity to replace a bad infrastructure with a good infrastructure at almost no cost. CampusEAI awarded us the grant.
A cynic (yes, there are a few when the word "portal" is uttered around here) might ask why we think a new portal infrastructure will be better than the old portal infrastructure. There are two major reasons why we are confident that this portal infrastructure will be leaps and bounds better than the current infrastructure. First of all, the new portal is JSR-168 compliant. Yeah, you say, I love everything that is JSR-168 compliant. Or, you more likely say, "dude, come on." The point is that the portal and portlet development (something that actually does something like displaying data relevant to you on the screen when you log on...think email) are built on open standards. This means that a vendor can't say to us: Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, you can't build on me. What it actually means is that Oracle (the purveyor of our new platform) has actually agreed that anyone who understands the standard can build portlets that sit on top of the new platform. This is a massive departure from what we currently can do...Today, if we wanted to build functionality into the new portal, we would have to pay a vendor a lot to do it or pay the vendor a lot to upgrade our portal so that we can do it. Those are not attractive options. The second reason that we are confident is that this is an Oracle-based portal and we have a lot of in-house Oracle expertise. So...we actually have the horses to pull the cart...(Sorry, Oracle DBAs, please don't hack me. :)
This is all a cause to celebrate. But the tool won't be used unless you use it. And you won't use it unless you want to use it. So, let me share some dates with you so that you understand how IT and the Web Services Team is planning on soliciting input and rolling this out.
At the end of March/Beginning of April, we will have a Beta version of the portal ready. We will invite a small group to use the portal and provide feedback (via the portal). After we have moved further into the Beta phase and have addressed some of the initial feedback, we will open up the Beta program to anyone who wants to use it. We will ask that people who participate in the Beta program be willing to provide input. Two different groups (IT and Web Services) will be asked to absorb the feedback and provide solutions. If you want new functionality (think big and small...some ideas: Single sign-ons, Facebook login, etc.), you will provide feedback that IT will then digest and evaluate. On the other hand, you may want to comment on the way that the information is laid out. This will be feedback that the Web Services team will absorb and address during the Beta phase of the project.
This leads me to my final point. There is another blog that talks about the layout and will invite pre-Beta feedback from the community. John Kiralla's blog is here. Please visit it.
When all is said and done, by late Fall, we will likely grab the Manegate server and go Office Space all over it. It will be cathartic.
