Your campus needs a portal

Sometimes people ask me why a higher education campus needs a portal. Financials software, learning management systems, the value proposition is more tangible. But a portal? A meta-application that itself doesn't do much? Why do I need that?

Here's the relevant problem universities have: they're complex, there's a lot going on, there's a lot of noise, there are all sorts of services dribbling all over the place. This is a source of stress. People miss opportunities. How many people wish they could go back to college and take one more class, attend one more guest speaker, get just a little more involved in some activity? I bet basically 100% of college graduates.

Those are the opportunities JA-SIG software helps people realize. Because by virtue of the Central Authentication Service) you spend less time mucking around with lots of different accounts or having your online identity stolen you're less stressed and more able to take advantage of university. Because the portal helps you to be aware of events and requirements and opportunities, you're able to plan more effectively and better use your time. Sakai as learning and collaboration system facilitates doing the real work of learning.

Colleges need to be on opensource because life is too short for artificial constraints, for a vendor telling you what you are and are not allowed to do. Opensource frees colleges to go after the services and integrations that will actually deliver value to their constituents, or at least help the technology get out of the way as much as possible, and it is that that will make the educational experience better. It frees them to choose the locally-appropriate spot on the edginess curve, whether they want to be very conservative and limit risk or want to be on the edge with lots of cutting edge code.

Enterprise portals are for "members" of the University community. Who play lots of different roles and have many different activities and needs. They are sometimes very serious and studious. They are sometimes playful. They are sometimes collaborating in ad-hoc groups. And sometimes they're just trying to navigate bureaucracy. uPortal and Sakai are flexible enough to accommodate all of these roles and behaviors: uPortal is all about gathering user attributes and using them to understand groups and roles and to provide appropriate content. It's all about aggregating relevant information to help someone stay on top of the game. And Sakai is both a relatively serious pedagogically-driven LMS and a platform for more adhoc collaboration. In addition to offering course-related sites, you can create sites in Sakai for various groups on campus to collaborate outside of the context of courses.

The software is complex but that's because it's modeling a university that is necessarily complex. This is complexity that is doing work.