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Friday, May 5, 2000
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Institutions Collaborate on Development of Free Portal SoftwareBy FLORENCE OLSEN
Ivy League and state colleges are pitching in to help create generic "portal" software whose source code will be free to any college or university that wants to use it. The institutions say their code will give colleges an advertising-free alternative to the free portal services offered by some commercial portal vendors. However, to use the free source code effectively could require hours of interdepartmental planning and a degree of technical expertise beyond that which most webmasters possess, say campus-technology experts involved in the collaborative programming project. Portal software is used to create personalized information sources and communities of interest within a campus or university World Wide Web site. Two-dozen colleges are working with a small software firm to develop what they say is the essential code for building a college or university portal. Campus portals automatically customize "channels" of information for individual students and employees at the moment they log in to the campus network. The most useful channels are highly customized to fit the roles and interests of each student or employee -- by bringing together "bits of applications and little bits of data," says Howard J. Strauss, manager of academic applications at Princeton University. "That takes a lot of work." Portal technology provides "a pocket-sized version of the campus Web," says Carl W. Jacobson, director of management information services at the University of Delaware. The university is a member of the programming group, which is working on specifications that would let faculty members download their customized calendars and course schedules directly from the portal onto hand-held computers like the Palm Pilot. Any campus that installs the free code can expect to do additional work to fill out the framework with its own Web pages, security programs, administrative databases, and computer applications, Mr. Strauss says. And the same issues that must be dealt with when building campuswide information systems must be reckoned with when building a portal, he says. "If you build a portal the way I imagine a portal is going to be built," Mr. Strauss says, "it's going to cut across every department, so you're back to the game of who owns the data, and who's going to provide it, and in what format are they going to provide it." Project participants say they expect to finish an initial version in July. The portal code and other shareable administrative software will be available to institutions through a clearing-house created by the participating colleges, which call themselves the Java in Administration Special Interest Group, or JA-SIG. The colleges in the group are Appalachian State University, Boston College, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, East Carolina University, Elizabeth City State University, Florida State University, Georgetown University, Portland Community College, Princeton University, Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology, the University of British Columbia, the University of California, the University of Chicago, the University of Delaware, the University of Hawaii, the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas, the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin, Wright State University, and Yale University. Five institutions are doing the actual coding, with additional help from Java programming specialists at a company called Interactive Business Solutions Inc. They are using the latest Java programming tools to create Java "servlets," which are small programs that run on any server. While most colleges generally favor buying commercial software rather than developing their own, as the JA-SIG colleges are doing, many of those same colleges say they are unhappy with the portal choices available in the commercial marketplace. Bernard W. Gleason of Boston College says colleges should not let themselves be seduced by portal vendors trying to gain control of higher-education Web sites, especially by those vendors offering free or low-priced portals supported by advertising. A college's or university's portal, "like the family jewels," should be kept in the family, says Mr. Gleason, an associate vice president in the office of information technology. He has written a white paper about portals. Fortunately, for Delaware, Mr. Jacobson says, the university can afford to pass up free or low-priced portal services from companies that sell advertising on the portal. "We don't want the campus Web to look like a NASCAR race car," he says. But some institutions have insufficient programmer or financial resources to build their own portal or to buy the commercial software, which is expensive, he says. Too many companies, he adds, are offering free portal services, and many of them will not survive. Meanwhile, he says, separate colleges and even departments within universities are signing up for free portal services from competing vendors -- and not notifying the information-technology managers on campus. "The students have multiple user I.D.'s and passwords -- it can be a real mess," he says. Mr. Strauss says that a campus, ideally, should have only one portal. "If you have six portals, you don't get the advantages of a portal," he says. But then who "owns" the portal? On many campuses, he says, it is not yet clear whether the organization now responsible for creating and maintaining the campus home pages will be the organization that creates and maintains the Web portal. In some cases, the library-services organization is responsible for the campus home pages. In other cases, the campus Web pages are the responsibility of the public-relations department or the information-technology division. And until that question is resolved, Mr. Strauss says, it will be "fought out in one university after another."
Background article from The Chronicle:
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 New center will encourage college board members to be "active, not activist" Wesley College president disabled link to paper whose originality is in question 2 key lawmakers vow to help N.S.F. double its budget in 5 years Clash with police on Indonesian campus leaves 2 students dead, 17 injured Armenian woman sues Israeli student group for discrimination Association for Computing Machinery to honor 10 scholars Spring commencement speakers are announced by 16 colleges Institutions collaborate on development of free portal software Colleges experiment with videoconferencing to answer questions of potential applicants |
Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education