Your Campus Needs a Portal

Sometimes people ask me why a higher education campus needs a portal. For financials software and learning management systems, the value proposition is more tangible. But a portal? A meta-application that itself doesn't do much? Why do I need that?

Here's the relevant problem universities have: they're complex, there's a lot going on, there's a lot of noise, there are all sorts of services dribbling all over the place. This is a source of stress. People miss opportunities. How many people wish they could go back to college and take one more class, attend one more guest speaker, get just a little more involved in some activity? I bet basically 100% of college graduates.

A good portal assists with coping with the university's complexity. Because the portal helps you to be aware of events and requirements and opportunities, you're able to plan more effectively and better use your time. Where it bridges disparate systems and aggregates links, you can concentrate in participating in your course, rather than be distracted in remembering which LMS happens to host the course. A portal lets you transport context from one computer to another, remembering bookmarks, notes, tasks, and plans. A portal's filtering and customization let you cut through the embarassment of riches to focus on what is especially relevant. A portal's aggregation capabilities allow you to spend less time navigating and more time with the content you were looking for.

Enterprise portals are for "members" of the University community. University participants play lots of different roles and have many different activities and needs. They are sometimes very serious and studious. They are sometimes playful. They are sometimes collaborating in ad-hoc groups. And sometimes they're just trying to navigate bureaucracy. uPortal and Sakai are flexible enough to accommodate all of these roles and behaviors: uPortal is all about gathering user attributes and using them to understand groups and roles and to provide appropriate content. It's all about aggregating relevant information to help someone stay on top of the game. And Sakai is both a relatively serious pedagogically-driven LMS and a platform for more adhoc collaboration. In addition to offering course-related sites, you can create sites in Sakai for various groups on campus to collaborate outside the context of courses.

Universities are complex. Your campus needs a portal because ideally the software makes the complexity more manageable, strengthening all portal users in making the most of their university affiliation.Your portal needs to be the higher-education-honed uPortal because it includes features and infrastructure suitable for modeling the complexity of universities, including attribute and group sources, permission policies and individual preferences, and pluggable proxiable authentication. Yes, it is complex, but the complexity is doing work.