EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5

Perhaps eVote could be positioned as a player in the uPortal framework as a portlet.

EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5 The uPortal project (http://www.uportal.org) began in 2000 as a $3.2 million open source project of JA-SIG to create portal software for education. Three years later, it earned the #4 spot in the '2003 InfoWorld 100 Awards.' Portals provide a way to consolidate an institution�s information and service offerings (e.g., find a book, add a class, locate a ride) in a personalized way for individual users. Portals can enable single sign-on across a range of services and can free content/service providers from redundant work in developing a user interface and navigation. Over 175 colleges and universities use uPortal, and five companies provide for-fee support for the software.

The fall 2004 release of uPortal incorporates a new industry standard for content and service providers to deliver their information through 'portlets.' The JSR-168 specification means that a service (e.g., search the Library of Congress, receive calendar updates from the NSF, join a course discussion group) can be delivered in a standard way to any JSR-168-based portal. The summer and fall 2004 releases also included a number of tools to simplify institution-wide administration of the software. In addition, the uPortal project partnered with the Sakai Project to pre-integrate the software from these two open source initiatives.

The uPortal project provides one of the more mature examples in higher education of how open source software can eliminate licensing fees, provide world-class software, and continue to innovate through the contributions of software and tools from many colleges, universities, companies, and individuals.