Wellesley has had Luminis portal for quite some time. We began actively promoting its use in the past 4 years. However, this is a very challenging system to understand, implement and maintain. The origins of Luminis are in an open source portal called uPortal. Ellucian, whatever the company was called back then,  decided to take a version of uPortal and implement it to work with Banner. This is the simple version of a long story.

Unfortunately, such techniques just don’t work as well as developing something that coexists with your software in a more integrated fashion. And it shows. I just spent a few weeks trying to unravel the mysteries of Luminis in order to get the information out so we can use it for our new portal and I was flabbergasted.

So, why a new portal? The version of Luminis we are currently running is being phased out & it is running on older operating systems that are not being upgraded. We spent considerable time and effort to look at what it would take to implement the upgraded version of Luminis, which in my opinion, is yet another mistake. Ellucian has decided to take LifeRay, a new open source portal, and branch it off to suit their needs. We estimated that the total resources required to implement and maintain the new Luminis portal is not worth it. We are not the only one who has come to this conclusion.

What is a portal after all? It is what the name implies and in simple terms it is a “bunch of links” to other resources and customized content that are highly context dependent. For eg. if you log in as a student you will see a different set of links appropriate for you than if you are a faculty. You can stretch this too far some times – “Let us show this link to only first year students who are from the state of Colorado” or more legitimately, “this content should show up only when the College is closed for snow emergency”. Though the generation of these contextual content is in itself not a big deal, there are several issues to contend with in the back end – the accuracy of underlying data, load balancing, etc.

We chose to implement the new portal in a technology in which we have become experts in – Drupal. Our website is currently done in Drupal and is hosted by Acquia. I would be happy to say that the overall satisfaction on this is very high on campus. As an organization, we have a lot more people that understand and can support Drupal than can Luminis. It also provides capabilities that we currently lack – stylizing the portal for example. In the Luminis portal, adding new links or content requires such specialized knowledge, sometimes it is plain scary! Not in the Drupal portal 🙂

We created the new portal in record time and we are rolling it out soon as a soft roll out. What does it mean? We invite anyone who wants to test it to do so and give us feedback. It is our intention to open it up to a larger audience and shut down access to Luminis sometime during the Spring semester. In the first version, we have simply replicated whatever is currently in Luminis. Once unleashed, we are very confident that the ease of use of this system combined with the creativity all around campus will result in a far superior experience and content delivery.

As you can tell, I am an optimist and I feel great about all the work that has been done. Now, we look to the community to help us make this into a more useful tool.