I was out in Jupiter FL during the Memorial day weekend to attend my wife’s nephew’s high school graduation. For me who has been used to small high school graduations (my children’s graduating classes were 155 and 170 students respectively), this was grand. It was held at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, where a group had to go early to reserve seats, despite being asked not to do it! Some of us joined a little late after a nice nap. As a result of this trip, I missed the commencement, well sort of… I was out that day, so I watched it on my PDA. It was great quality stream. There were 700-1000 views during the 10:30-1:00 PM live cast. We have heard very good feedback, and I am sure several parents and relatives of international students who could not make it here in person, benefited from watching this remotely.

Information overload is everywhere, it is also local. We routinely hear from our users how they did not know about something important that we have communicated to. This will continue to be the case because what is important and relevant is in the eyes of the beholders and depending on how it is conveyed, it may or may not sound important! One of the major problems is the lack of coherence – information is all over the place. This is where, the promised land of enterprise portals comes in.

By now, everyone knows what a portal is. We use Luminis from SunGard. It is nothing but a framework that allows you to organize and deliver the information in a very intuitive way to the end users. Well, this turns out to be a much harder task than it appears. SunGard decided to build their portal based on an open source portal framework called uPortal. uPortal development began in 2000 and was funded by Mellon Foundation. There were some 20 colleges and universities that participated in the development, but if I remember correctly, University of Delaware, Princeton and Yale had significant initial contribution for the development.

When we were asked to develop a portal like system at Wesleyan in 1999-2000, I co-led the project and took a deep dive (I still remember spending my holiday break on this) into uPortal and have had a healthy respect for the software. There are some 600 odd colleges and universities use the software. uPortal frankly reminded me of kerberos.

These are systems that are excellent, but way ahead of their times, written by larger institutions, primarily for their own use and require significant resources to maintain and support. Of course, over a period of time, others see the value in these and end up morphing them into something that is more usable. For eg. all Windows OS after Windows 2000 use Kerberos as the underlying protocol and many users don’t know or care about it!

SunGard, like all ERP vendors, realized that they needed a portal because their own applications needed a central delivery platform and everyone was banging on their doors to be able to integrate other apps through a central delivery mechanism. SunGard decided to adopt the uPortal as their portal, called it Luminis and integrated their self service application delivery through this. Integrating systems is not as easy as it appears at first and as has been proven numerous times, such integrations result in bad software where the result is always far less than the sum of parts.

So, SunGard, after realizing that the uPortal integration and divergence from it is not working, has decided to go with a relatively new open source (a bit more modern) framework called LifeRay. We saw a demo yesterday and like all the demos, it looked impressive and like all the demos, many of the desirable functions are scheduled sometime into the “near” future – means, add another 6 months to 1 year before the feature is ready to use. This time, like before, they claim that the LifeRay component of it will remain independent, so if we want to pick up an open source module for it and install it, we are free to do so. Time will tell where this takes us…

In the meantime, what are we to do? Our strategy is going to be simple – 80-85% of our users needs are for accessing data and the remainder is for entering data. For entering data, rely on delivered SunGard processes because this is what the software is good at. They will never be able to anticipate and deliver everything our users want the way they expect because no two institutions have the same exact needs.

So, we plan to develop independent, portal agnostic applications. What does this mean? Let us go back to the basics – what do we want a portal to do? In simple terms, we want it to be the launching pad for our users. This is where we would like them to come to find all information and go to various applications. Let us use the portal for what it is good for – signing a user on and providing a framework for customizing what appears on her/his portal. Actual content that appears in those boxes called portlets are done by applications completely outside portal. Some of these apps are “delivered” product from SunGard.

What we plan to do is to create our own apps that have a handshake with the portal, so we know exactly who it is that clicked to come to the application, based on which we will deliver the content with data taken from Banner and potentially a variety of other sources. This way, we control the content delivery and look and feel. Some would argue that this is risky, and I say, it is less riskier than telling our users “please wait for SunGard to deliver this in Q4 of 2011, well, maybe!”.

This is what we are going to do and you will begin to see the results of this approach starting in the Fall of 2011.