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uPortal Consulting services are a valuable asset to higher education institutions in creating a personalized gateway to the online campus. Gilfus Education Group provides expertise and resources that are required in building out the uPortal framework and ensuring uPortal’s long-term success.
Consulting
Gilfus Education Group UPortal consulting services help in advising institutions on how to take full advantage of uPortal to meet their business objectives.
Training and Mentoring
General uPortal mentorship affords institutions access to a Unicon developer-consultant experienced in working with uPortal. Our consultants are made available to your institution to assist and mentor your staff.
Types of mentoring activities include: answering questions, helping staff execute on portal development, providing guidance on portal configuration tasks, performing research and producing documentation as requested up to the agreed amount of hours. Mentorship assists in knowledge transfer to grow an institution’s staff’s expertise in the development of the uPortal framework and for maintaining the uPortal instance.
In order to remain competitive, institutions must continue to deliver innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Limited resources and shrinking budgets are quickly putting proprietary software options out of reach. This dilemma has caused institutions to come together and create open source solutions for higher education, such as Jasig’s uPortal framework.
What is uPortal?
uPortal is the leading open source enterprise portal framework built by and for the higher education community. uPortal continues to evolve through contributions from its global community and is supported by resources, grants, donations, and memberships fees from academic institutions, commercial affiliates, and non-profit foundations. uPortal is built on open standards-based technologies such as Java and XML, and enables easy, standards-based integration with authentication and security infrastructures, single sign-on secure access, campus applications, web-based content, and end user customization. It is one of the most widely deployed open source enterprise portal frameworks, having been adopted by hundreds of institutions and the eResearch community, world wide.
History of uPortal
In 2001, a group of 20 institutions, including Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Delaware, University of British Columbia, Cal Poly, Columbia, Holy Cross, Georgetown, and Boston College, recognized the need to protect the institutional image, to exploit the potential of the portal, and to promote the use of Java technology. Under the sponsorship of Sun Microsystems, these institutions formed the Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JASIG), now Jasig (no longer called Java in Administration Special Interest Group). Securing a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, volunteers from Interactive Business Solutions (a company subsequently acquired by Unicon, Inc.) and the participating institutions developed a free and open source portal focused on the use cases of higher education. The uPortal project has enjoyed considerable success with over 600 production deployments, and remains the most widely used open source portal in higher education.
What is Jasig?
Jasig is a consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates sponsoring open source software projects for higher education, fostering collaboration within and among communities of practice. Jasig is a non-profit 501(c)3 membership organization organizing conferences in support of open source software design, development, and implementation. Jasig provides hosting and representation for several open source projects including uPortal and Central Authentication Service (CAS) .
Contact the Gilfus Education Group to learn more on UPortal Consulting:
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