These are the notes of my presentation on July 10 where UCIST and faculty people discussed portal in general, uPortal, and the Nexus mywaterloo.ca Portal

• our work was aimed at a perceived need and was very focused - to supply popular networked resources to our nexus users
  • home/workterm access to faculty resources, using secure protocols because there are insecure remote sites, eg. cable modems
  • campus wireless access - secure without need for VPN
• idea grew out of login Polaris browser with Email features since the 1990's
• appears to fit a niche, several thousand different users use it every week (we keep and display stats for each week)
• widest possible market - all web browsers supported (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera, ... ).
• currently adding content with new channels, but it remains simplistic
• lacks persistance of user desktop
• soon will have roles which will customize content
• not intending to be "the" campus portal, rather provide access to user working environment
• existing channels come from day-to-day contact with clients, improve their access to our systems, reduce our workload providing support
• server environment - unix, php, apache, horde environment
• requires some upgrades to faculty email server software eg. wu-ftpd which comes with new Solaris 9, but needs to be added to existing Solaris 8 on campus
• bunch of developers, currently AHS, Science, Engineering, and soon ES. Support and interest from Math and Arts from even some academic support areas on campus.
• distributed management
  • accounts distributed across Email servers, passwords too
  • once authenticated with any campus Email server, identity is trusted as an on-campus user
  • does not require hierarchical management, and supported by home faculty consulting offices
  • requests for help are forwarded to the user's faculty help desk

A brief demo was given of the production environment.