Enterprise Portal Built by and for Higher Education

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1 Enterprise Portal Built by and for Higher Education Now Responsive for All Devices along with Native App Experience There is a growing demand for higher education institutions to offer an increasing amount of resources and services via a variety of devices. Students, faculty, and staff need to easily access critical campus information no matter their location. uportal SM meets this need by providing a responsive desktop and mobile enterprise platform for aggregation of content and campus services. Aggregation is one of uportal s three major capabilities as an enterprise portal (the other two being personalization and access control). uportal provides a single gateway website for all users to find and access all the services and content provided by the institution. uportal 4.1 The latest version of uportal includes many exciting features, designed to support the complete student lifecycle and to provide services for parents, faculty, and staff as well. Of these features, two satisfy growing trends amongst demands from constituents of their enterprise portal Responsive Design, which provides a consistent and seamless experience across all devices (desktops, tablets, and smartphones) and a native mobile app experience for iphone and Android devices. Another major new feature in uportal is an App Launcher feature that allows apps to be launched from a single interface, A Powerful, Flexible Horizontal Integration Platform uportal is a secure, horizontal integration platform designed to integrate and aggregate information from multiple applications. uportal is vendor neutral. It is based on open standards and Java development best practices, supports both JSR-286 (Portlet 2.0) and JSR-168 (Portlet 1.0) standards, and can leverage existing investment in authentication, SIS, RDBMS, application server, and other infrastructure. uportal is highly scalable for enter-prise deployments and is proven to scale over a million users.

2 Features for a Robust User Experience The latest version of uportal includes many cutting-edge features, making it easier than ever for the institution to develop, design, and brand uportal. These features are added to the extensive list of features uportal already boasts. The portal provides technologies for successful enterprise integration and content aggregation, including a powerful core framework, flexible layouts, interface customization, user experience, portal administration, authentication and security, groups and permissions, and mobile access. uportal Features Core Framework Features uportal's flexible, enterprisegrade APIs allow adopters to cleanly extend the portal to meet local requirements and integrate with other campus services. A modular architecture maintains a separation between portal and portlet code, resulting in a lightweight deployment with separately upgradeable components. Flexible Layouts uportal's sophisticated layout management merges administrator-defined content with user customization. Portal tabs may be both administrator managed and user-editable, via drag and drop layout customization featuring alternate keyboard interactions. Layout, including tabs, is determined by personal user attributes and group memberships. User Experience uportal boasts an impressive feature set that allows institutions to create a rich, accessible user experience for faculty, students, and staff, including: Interface Customization Higher education institutions can brand their uportal instance through highly customizable themes and skins. Each layer of uportal's rendering pipeline provides flexibility for institutional customization. The user manual and inline documentation guide developers, while developer-centric tools can disable caching and add debugging resources during the development lifecycle.

3 Secure Environments for Faculty, Staff, and Students Portal Administration Updates to portal administration make it simpler than ever to create, assign, and manage groups, permissions, and content. Portal administration features include: Authentication, Security, and Privacy uportal ships with Apereo's Central Authentication Service (CAS) enabled for authentication out of the box. It includes APIs and a configuration mechanism for validating user credentials against multiple backing credential stores, including databases and LDAP. uportal may also be integrated with other SSO frameworks, such as Pub-Cookie and Internet2's Shibboleth. uportal's Person Directory API merges user attribute information from multiple sources, including LDAP, Active Directory, and custom databases. User attributes drive content distribution and authorization decisions. uportal ensures security by following current best practices to guard against SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. User attributes and data from remote sources are not copied into the uportal database, protecting the privacy of uportal users and preventing the proliferation of sensitive data across campus databases. Groups and Permissions uportal's Groups API allows the portal to consume group information from multiple sources, including LDAP, Active Directory, Grouper, and custom databases. uportal's new Groups Management Portlet provides an attractive dashboard for managing and creating groups, and supports delegated administration. The permissions framework represents administrative privileges, content access, and provides an extensible solution for handling custom authorization tasks. The Permissions API works alongside uportal's groups framework and is capable of handling permissions inheritance. Create, assign, and manage groups, permissions, and content with new dashboard interface.

4 Additional Features for Ease of Access Native App Experience Constituents want constant access to their academic, work, and social environments, while embracing mobile computing as part of their lifestyle. Pushing essential information and services to mobile devices has gone from optional to mandatory. Students, faculty, and staff expect instant access to maps, directories, academics, and other vital IT services to help them navigate their campus or work experience when they are mobile. Campus communities and organizations can require a variety of custom services, propelling CIOs and IT administrators to deliver personalized mobile content to each group. Now institutions have a reliable native application that meets the demand of constituents who are using mobile technology, while allowing the institution to stay in control of the platform. Native Device Integration Native device integration improves the performance and usability of uportal while providing universities with a presence in the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace. The native app also integrates with native device resources, such as GPS and address books, to provide features like directions to campus locations and download of contact information to the user address book. umobile's native app currently supports iphone and Android devices. Browserbased mobile support is available for: App Launcher Portlet Organize and launch apps from a single interface with the App Launcher portlet, including apps for announcements, calendar, social media, weather, and more. Provide easy access to important information for students, faculty, and staff with this unique portlet that serves as a central launching point for critical applications. Check , grades, course schedule, and other custom content through apps/ portlets developed either by Unicon or the Apereo Foundation community. The Unicon team can develop apps to help constituents access any kind of information the institution deems necessary. The App Launcher portlet is an economical solution to providing a campus portal that meets the demands of students, faculty, and staff. Easily launch numerous apps from a single interface with the "App Launcher" portlet.

5 Maximize uportal to Meet Institutional Goals Responsive Design The demand for students, faculty, and staff to access critical resources on-the-go is rising and institutions need to respond to this growing demand. uportal s latest feature, Responsive Design, provides access to your constituents on any and all devices (desktops, tablets, and smartphones). Responsive Design provides users with an optimal mobile experience with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling. Multi-Tenancy Institutions and college systems may face the challenge of providing several individual departmental or campus portals to constituents in a costeffective manner. Multi-tenancy solves this challenge by extending the capabilities of an enterprise, allowing separate departments or campuses to independently use the same portal environment within one instance of the software. Several of Unicon s clients use uportal s multi-tenancy feature to meet their IT business challenges. The main function of the portal is to give each entity within the clients IT infrastructures the ability to present personalized content through applications integrated with the portal. The portal provides a foundation for the entities to present a variety of applications and services with a potential to provide a rich single sign-on user experience. Marketplace A top priority amongst institutions is maximizing the institution s portal to its greatest potential so it can adequately serve students, staff, and faculty. Adding new content to the portal could be a seamless, simple experience if the institution is using the right technology. uportal provides this experience through one of its newest features, Marketplace. Finding content to add to uportal has never been easier with Marketplace. It gives students, staff, and faculty the ability to customize their portal interface by adding portlets through an app store experience. Marketplace provides a richer experience for finding content and is designed to replace the Personalization Gallery used in earlier versions of uportal. The roadmap for Marketplace includes the addition of screenshots, videos, ratings, and reviews. More Features Additional features such as statistics and auditing are also available with uportal. To view the complete feature set and gallery, please visit: Screenshot showing the categories displayed on the landing page, after the category button is clicked.

6 Extending the Portal Portlet Development and Deployment Successful enterprise portals deliver compelling integrations with campus services, combining diverse IT resources to create a unified, personalized user experience. uportal delivers content through bundled portlets and Apereo open source portlet projects. Apereo Open Source Portlet Projects The Apereo community focuses on several portlet projects. These portlets are not bundled with uportal, but can be downloaded and added to the portal: Benefits of leveraging the Apereo community include: Bundled Portlets uportal includes a number of portlets outof-the-box. These portlets are modularized using well-defined standard portlet APIs. They will run in any JSR-168 compliant portal and can be upgraded separately from the uportal platform itself. Apereo portlets share a focus on performance, security, and integration, and all portlets make use of common Apereo libraries for browser-side caching of user interface resources and validation of user input. Currently available Apereo portlets include: Community Resources and Support In addition to robust functionality and advanced technology, many community resources are available through the Apereo community of expert portal developers and enthusiasts. Learn More For more information, please visit Calendar Portlet

7 Unicon Services for uportal Unicon Services for uportal Unicon provides IT consulting, services, and support for uportal. Services include:

8 uportal Implementation Packages from Unicon Unicon offers a variety of implementation packages that can meet any institution s budget. Please contact Unicon for more information on the services each package includes. Silver Package Gold Package uportal Installation Customization & Integration Additional Services uportal Hosting Additional Server Deployments uportal Implementation Planning Session Portlet Development Training Courses Portlet Integration CAS Implementation Native App Implementation High Availability/ Load Balancing uportal Platform Training BONUS! 2 days on-site Platinum Package uportal Installation Customization & Integration uportal Platform Training uportal Branding BONUS! 2 days on-site The Apereo Foundation ( was formed by the merger of Jasig ( and the Sakai ( Foundation in late December Sakai and Jasig had pioneered the production and adoption of open source software for higher education for over ten years. Apereo will take that work further, providing a more rational and improved organizational umbrella for a range of projects and software communities serving higher education. The core mission of the Foundation is to "assist and facilitate educational organizations which collaborate to foster, develop, and sustain open technologies and innovation to support learning, teaching, and research. teaching, and research. Unicon provides services and support for uportal, and is a Commercial Affiliate of the Apereo Foundation. For more information, please contact Unicon at: 1760 East Pecos Road, Suite 432 Gilbert, AZ Phone Fax info@unicon.net uportal 4.1 is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Full details on Apereo licensing are available at: Copyright 2015, Apereo. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit: