Why Switching?
I've noticed a few recent posts about schools moving away from Luminis (specifically to Liferay & Sharepoint). I am curious why your switcthing, what your switching to and what else was considered. Also, what do you expect to lose/re-create because of the switch?
(I'm in no way declaring my school is thinking of switching, I'm just curious of the reasoning.) I am aware the Luminis & UPortal portals are pretty old school as far as a webportal is concerned.
LifeRay
I imagine a lot of schools are at least investigating LifeRay since it's the new platform that Luminis 5 is developed on (no more uPortal). Getting at least a solid background of how LifeRay works can help quite a bit in understanding the changes that will be necessary if the school is interested in a "next gen" portal.
As you mentioned, the feature set out of the box for Luminis 4 isn't very competitive in 2010. It's a completely reasonable platform and you can develop 2010 level functionality in it (evidenced by some great work I've seen on this site) but with budgets and resources the way they are a lot of schools don't have a ton of developers and technicians that can dedicate time to developing/modifying/integrating "Web 2.0" type content when a framework exists that gives you a lot of that right out of the box.
With a Luminis platform you
With a Luminis platform you get the following features (not comprehensive):
Looking at the list above, we have encountered many problems, or limitations that each of these features have. As a result, custom development has been done to address limitations with every point on this list. As fuerstm points out, times are tough, and development is costly.
Luminis is also easily the most complicated program we have in the categories of installation, configuration. and maintenance.
Liferay, by contrast, is a newer product that provides a current framework, solid APIs, and great documentation. It, and other Portal products offer features people come to expect today, such as AJAX integration, rich interfaces, user customizations, easy addition of channels, drag and drop, performance, and reliability.
Another good example of what a Portal is capable of with today's technologies, is netvibes.com
is liferay new?
At least 6 years ago, when trying to set up a Virtual Research Environment (see UK JISC VRE programme - phase 1) we were looking for ways to present JSR 168 (Portlet) alongside ordinary uPortal IChannels. We looked into most of the portal frameworks that were available at the time. We were in the very early stages of getting to grips with Luminis.
Liferay 1.0 was one of the options, alongside uPortal (2.5? - or maybe still 2.4 with an adaptor for portlets). In the end we plumped for running a pluto framework that was then proxied into Luminis.
I think it would be very interesting to see the landscape today.
Which portal frameworks exist, and what features do they supply Out-Of-the-Box? What is the support and development community like for them? Are the differences in the hosting model etc...
Derek
University of Leeds, UK
Liferay, Netvibes cont.
Just look at this ONE page for Liferay: http://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-portal/features/portal
That is enough to make me consider switching. The fact that it is a product with a downloadable trial, and good documentation is a great indicator.
Also, Netvibes (while hosted) is another platform that just screams awesome right when you land on the page: http://www.netvibes.com
I would imagine that the landscape of Portal software as significantly changed since the days of uPortal 2.5 (which is quite ugly)
If you like the LifeRay demo,
If you like the LifeRay demo, you should check out what CampusEAI has built using LifeRay as a platform:
http://www.campuseai.org/Products/campus_portal_overview.html
Switching from Luminis to CampusEAI myCampus?
Wow! Thanks for this link Jesse! We have been looking at Liferay for a while, but CampusEAI's myCampus seems like a much better alternative than to build our own portal from scratch on Liferay-vanilla.
From a preliminary review of the site, it looks like alot of schools have already switched from Luminis to myCampus:
http://www.campuseai.org/CaseStudies/From-SunGard-Luminis-to-myCampus.html
It would be interesting to talk to these schools to find out why they switched.
We found this recorded web seminar (with a Banner school) to be informative as well on Banner/Banner Self-Service integration:
http://campuseai.org/Grant/curry_college_iseminar_28jan.html
While googling for more information, I found this internal memo from what appears to be a Banner school that selected myCampus. It was interesting to review their votes and comments.
http://www.lccc.edu/media/files/January%2015%20LT%20Recommendations.pdf
Based on our initial investigation, we have start to look at switching to myCampus as an alternative to migrating to Luminis V.
Liferay Portal... but not.
Hi Morgan,
I would like to mention that there are other things to consider before moving over to CampusEAI's platform. While it is true that myCampus is built on Liferay Portal, I would note that it is built on some "flavor" of our Community Edition rather than our Enterprise Edition and that myCampus itself is unsupported by Liferay. Further, you should be cognizant of the fact that our latest Service Pack of our Enterprise Edition has over 1000 fixes and enhancements over the Community Edition that myCampus is using.
In our own testing, our Enterprise Edition (EE) performed 10x better than our last Community Edition, due to all the testing and refactoring that our own QA and Support teams invested to harden our EE.
All in all, I'm sure that there may be some benefits to using CampusEAI's platform. But I would caution you that CampusEAI's myCampus is not the same as Liferay Portal EE, and certainly does not have the same level of investment into the portal itself as our own Liferay engineers have poured into our own product. In the end, you'll want to weigh the pros and cons with each product, and of course factor in the price and maintainability as well.
Best,
--
Brian Kim
Higher Education Portals vs Portal Framework
Brian Kim? Are you the Chief Operating Office of Liferay? Why would you be monitoring/posting on a Luminis user group site that is for colleges/universities to share lessons learned and best practices with each other?
From your post, it seems like you are trying to sell "Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE), a commercial version of (y)our market leading open source portal that provides an alternative for enterprises that face hindrances to adopting open source software." (http://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-portal/ee/faq)
We are NOT an enterprise that faces hinderances to adopting open source software. We embrace open source. In fact, the only reason why we are even considering Liferay is because your Liferay Portal Community Edition (CE) is available under the MIT open source license. (similar to uPortal or JBoss Portal) One of the key reasons why we are considering myCampus is because it is based on Liferay Portal CE and uses other open source technologies such as Jasig CAS. Liferay Portal EE is just another commercial portal framework. If we wanted commercial software we would purchase Oracle WebCenter or Microsoft Sharepoint.
One of the key reasons why we are no longer looking at Liferay Portal EE is because during our initial investigation process a number of your EE clients that we talked with were dissatisfied with your services. They wondered that perhaps because you are a start-up that you might be too stretched, and they are worried about your ability to provide timely technical support.
In contradiction to your post, your website seems to promote a positive perception of Liferay CE to potential clients:
"Those who don't need or want to commit to a services contract still have access to the latest features at absolutely no cost and no business risk. We will still continue to develop and innovate as we always have and provide maintenance releases for the most recent version of CE..."
Contrary to the information on your website, it seems that you, as the COO, are putting down your own product.
To be honest, this whole discussion is pretty irrelevent. We are not comparing myCampus vs Liferay (CE or EE). That is like comparing a car to a steering wheel.
We are looking for a "solution" that caters to our needs in higher education. Liferay Portal is not a higher education solution it is a portal framework. Portal frameworks such as uPortal or Liferay or JBoss are just commodity components to real a higher education portal solutions such as Luminis and myCampus.
Does Liferay Portal (or even JBoss Portal) have features that help us retain students, increase our enrollment? It doesn't. Does it provide alerts from Banner 8? or integrate with INB? Does provide eportfolios for our learners? No. No. No. We would have to build and maintain all of this if we used Liferay CE or EE and we don't have the time or resources to do that. WIth solutions like Luminis and myCampus, we get these "higher education" features that portal framewokrs like Liferay will never be able to provide because the main focus of your product development is not higher education.
Even though I don't agree with some of your comments in your post, I really like the Liferay CE project, and I hope that you will continue to support the Liferay Community.
just a question about eportfolio
Will Luminis 5 be offering an eportfolio?
If so, will this be an open source offering or something that is a custom development bolted on? I just wonder about the quality of eportfolios that are embedded in portals or even VLEs (i.e. we have Blackboard).
Three years ago I saw a very good eportfolio called OSP2 (not sure if the 2 is a version number or a web gimmick), but again if the portal framework can take out some of the configuration of the eportfolio then that would be a good thing.
Derek
University of Leeds, UK
iGoogle
Speaking of other portals, has anyone investigated iGoogle?
Christine
no partnership with Liferay?
Does anyone find it odd that CampusEAI doesn't have a technology partnership with Liferay? They partner with other technology vendors, both proprietary and open source:
http://www.campuseai.org/About/strategic_technology_partners.html
C'mon, their product is based on Liferay's platform!
What I don't see with CampusEAI, that I do with Liferay, is a vibrant community that actually uses their product under the open source license. I understand CampusEAI is offered under an open source license as well, but are there any uses of CampusEAI where they weren't paid for support of their product?
I'm curious to know - any use cases of CampusEAI portal that don't involve support or some payment made to them?
Nope, looks like I have to PAY to join the CampusEAI community. WTF? At least Liferay is completely open and free for all community activities.
http://www.campuseai.org/Community/Membership_Levels.html
don't mind monitoring and input.
Brian I liked your response. As a technologist, its good to see an interest from the company whose product you may be using.
I'm curious though, do bring up Community vs Enterprise becuase Luminis 5 will be on your Enterprise Edition?
uPortal also a good option
As a school that uses both Banner and uPortal, as well as Sakai, I find this thread interesting. We have had a lot of success integrating uPortal and Banner using CAS and proxy CAS to pull information from Banner into both Sakai and uPortal.
We find the latest versions of uPortal to be a solid modern portal platform supporting standard portlets, rich portlet development, a drag-and-drop interface and much improved UI for many functions, and, new in uPortal 3.2, a mobile theme that Yale is very interested in. Jasig (uPortal umbrella organization that also hosts the CAS project) has also begun supporting a growing library of portlets for use with any standards compliant portal.
We evaluated and considered Luminis a couple of times in the past but preferred the community source version of uPortal. This has allowed us to move to new versions fairly rapidly and adopt new functions as needed. We are looking forward to the 3.3 release of uPortal so we can take advantage of JSR-286 portlets.
In terms of support, we've found the uPortal community to be highly technical and extremely helpful in solving issues. We have also purchased a membership in the Unicon Cooperative Support Program which gives us added depth in supporting uPortal. We have less than 2 FTE's assigned to the portal project but have no trouble supporting a production environment used by all resident students for at least one application and by all staff as the gateway to time keeping and self service benefits processing. Our mandate seems to swing like a pendulum from students to staff to faculty depending on institutional priorities and our experience has been that uPortal is a good platform for answering all the requirements. So far we haven't found any limitations that caused us to consider migration.
I would think using uPortal community source version (as opposed to proprietary Luminis V) could be a good option for schools that want to stick with an open, community-driven project.
picking the better of two evils
So campus eai uses the free edition of Liferay, some freely available portlets add a few customizations and from what i have heard provide lousy support -- call themselves a consortium that provides grants but operate like a vendor and charge you subscription service. Probably the only grant that i heard of where you end up paying lol. Also i believe they only provide a cloud solution which means giving up all you data to sit on their servers.
Liferay on the other hand pretends to be an open source company -- deliberately provide an open source product that is not up to par as per Brian above in terms of security and performance so that you can buy their EE edition. Not sure how good their support is if you buy the EE edition but from comments above seems like might be lousy as well. They also seem like a small family run business and not sure how much capacity they have to support a growing customer base. Pre sales have not been too impressive so far.
I guess if I had pick from the two crappy companies to do business with probably will be Liferay so that at least I can get a product that has the least security and performance issues since a lot of secure data is behind a portal.
I guess companies like Unicon also provide support for Liferay which I guess would be worth considering.
Still an open source company
I came across this thread again and so I thought I'd chime in.
Liferay was born in 2000 as an open source project. We established a community and built a business model around it. But what we realized was that we were spending too much time consulting and not enough time building out new functionality. It's for that reason that we created the Enterprise Edition. We knew that companies would need the support for our product, and the revenue generated would help get our guys off consulting projects and more focused on building out our product. Our Community Edition is intended for smaller organizations or for non-mission critical applications. There isn't anything deliberate about our making it not "up to par". We release a version for the community (several actually), and then we spend extra weeks and engineering resources to later release the Enterprise Edition for enterprises to use. That said, we have companies that prefer not to use our Enterprise Edition, and we're OK with that. It's how our company was built - via the community.
If you'd like to find out more about our company, you're all the more welcome to come to one of our symposiums and see what other people think. I won't deny that once upon a time we were a small business, but I like to think that we've grown up a lot since those early days. We've long since had dedicated teams for support around the clock.
I hope I haven't gone too far off topic. I know that this is a Luminis forum, but I wanted to at least share a little bit of insight into our company. Best of luck in figuring out what is best for your organization.
This portal is so 80's?
I recently joined a Banner institution and am dismayed with my first impression of the Luminis portal. It is nothing like the current generation of students would tolerate except that they don't have a choice. In my former life, we had a different ERP vendor (they are all fairly equally good/bad) and were able to present iGoogle as the portal by developing a few self service gadgets (using the ERP vendor provided hooks) and (thanks to Google) reserving some real estate on the portal page.
This allowed our students to customize the portal with their own social/other gadgets/channels and still receive web services related to ERP system like register for classes, add/drop, see their courses with links to LMS, faculty home pages, course syllabus, their schedule populated in Google Calendar, see their email, and others).
The benefit was that they would come to the portal to interact with their 'friends' at FaceBook, tweet to their heart's pleasure and do other fun stuff. The personalized institutional services were secondary but importantly, accessible.
Has any Banner institution done something similar?
Thank you for sharing your ideas.
80's hehe
I don't recall html even existing in the 80's:)
But you're right. Lum 3 and 4 based on uPortal and Sungards mods were pretty dated. Table layout well past the time that css/html had progressed beyond that, channel types that were hard to develop for, not much in the way of a community of developers (no app repository), etc...
But it is possible to significantly improve the portal by re-skinning it, using deep links into SSB, adding drag/drop channels, creating custom applications and serving them through the web proxy channel or iFrame channel, etc...I've both developed and seen some pretty impressive ajax'y/modern things running in Luminis.
I have a feeling that your new institution is likely using a pretty baseline version of Luminis. If you get a chance to go to Summit, attend the Luminis Idol session. You'll likely see some impressive mods.
Luminis 5, on the other hand, is going to be a whole new ballgame. It is built around http://www.liferay.com/ , which has a modern set of 'channels/plugins. Like google gadgets, so there is all of your facebook/twitter stuff without having to design anything custom.
Have other schools switched from Luminis to another vendor?
We are on Luminis 4 and it will cost us a significant amount of resources to convert to Luminis 5. Are other schools considering a switch? CAmpusEAI, Liferay solo, Blackboard, homegrown portal?
-Tom
if only we had spare resource
As it is Friday, I may as well rant lyrical.
At the moment it is difficult for us to find the resource to just keep upright on Luminis 4, there are always essential tasks stacking up and waiting.
The transition to Luminis 5 will require a lot of effort, and a lot of technology learning. Also we are still not sure whether the primary features will still be there.
We are struggling to find time to look at 4.3 (to see if it fixes the problems we need fixing, but doesn't introduce other headaches).
My ideal would be to have a few "spare" portals in a sandbox, say Liferay and uPortal 3. Then alongside the normal Lum 4 development, we could deploy a portlet in those. This would allow us to be in a better postion to have transition to the most suitable framework for us.
Of course, we use Group Studio and GCF. We might need to push for systems to implement Shib or CAS, and write a JAAS route for Luminis / Liferay / uPortal to be Shib SPs (or CAS token getters).
All of that is completely aside to reviewing the primary/secondary content of the Portal - and improving the UI so that jQuery, drag and drop, easy customisation are the norm...
Derek
University of Leeds, UK
- none of this is an official institutional position
p.s. which framework lends itself to a mobile interface (I am going to ask this at the Jasig "Spotlight on Open Source", Denver, May 2011!)
iGoogle
Thanks for sharing. We are looking into iGoogle at Bucknell and welcome knowledge of others doing the same.
+Greg