Tuesday, June 27, 2006

How to make the varsity team

Sadly, uPortal didn't make this list of recommended portals. Why? Well, the categories of recommendation are a little elucidating. uPortal needs to be better at:

  1. Ease of installation

  2. Number and usefulness of included portlets

  3. Extensibility of architecture



I would have thought that uPortal was already way ahead on "extensibility of architecture", with XSLT templating technology, exceptionally powerful groups and permissions, an excellent and pluggable DLM layout manager, and ever increasing Springy declarative configuration, with a rosy expected future of all-Spring-all-the-time in uPortal 3, Peter's highly pluggable rendering pipeline, and Mark's pointedly pluggable parameter processing pipeline for the next rev of DLM. And of course pluggable error rendering, still one of my favorite features ever. Awareness of the extensibility of uPortal is less than it ought to be and there are things we could do in the documentation and web presence to raise awareness of the uPortal strengths.

Far to go and much to learn. But uPortal is still an excellent portal as is and I would have liked to have seen it make the list.

1 comment:

Patrick Berry said...

I think one area that uPortal doesn't jive with those on the list is that it's more of a framework than a product. Yeah, there are some things included to demonstrate the power "under the hood", but for the most part an institution needs to take that power and harness it do what they specifically need it to do. Don't worry Andrew, I'm putting all that in the Chico profile I'm writing ;-)