Recently in Portal Category

Joe came to me the other day after having an information sessions with some students and told me about a quarter of them could log into mail, but not the portal. This had me a little confused, as they both use sundown ldap authentication.

I poked around a bit in amconsole trying to figure out some differences between those users where it worked, and the one username I had that did not work. I came across the success and failure urls for that user, and there was nothing in those fields. I decided to run a comparison on the ldap entries, and there turned out to be all the portal attributes (and possibly others) that were missing from that user's ldap entry.

I brought this to Ron's attention and he was perplexed as to why that user was missing those attributes. He has a script that runs through all users and adds those attributes, so he'll run it again and contact this user to try again. Hopefully that is the issue and it will be resolved. BTW, it was a username in a format without the year on the end, so it's a user that has been here for awhile. New users are getting all the necessary attributes.

I've managed to get all the UCS staff who have blogs set up as a channel within the portal. I only have them available, not selected, so to see them you would have to click on "Content" and select the blogs you would like to have up. I've also added a couple more news feeds and one for slashdot.org.

I've updated the portal login screen to conform to our new style all around. I've also asked Ron to add the Portal Desktop and SSO Adapter services to all the users, rather than having me go through the GUI for each user and adding those. With these services in place, all users will be able to log into the portal and view the great benefits. I'm still working around an initial install error, so I'm unable to get the calendar and mail sso attributes set. I have the channels availabe for people to add to the desktop with instructions in the help (? button), but this will probably not be standard until we get the SSO issue resolved.

I have a basic portal implementation up in production. It has basic information, links and news available. It looks pretty slick! The only issue I see are the blog channels. For some reason, they don't always appear correctly. Subsequent reload of the page seem to eventually get them displayed, however, I'm not sure what the issue might be. Is it the way the blogs xml is formatted? The way I've set up my xsl file to read the rdf? Channel issues (unlikely since other xml channels seem to diplay without error)?

Anyone can login and view it, as it uses ldap authentication (your email username and password). Take a look and let us know what you think so far.

I've started creating and customizing the help pages for the portal. Unfortunately, each page will have to be modified for not only content, but style as well, as there is no way to use css with this setup. Fortunately it doesn't appear to be too many.

I've had to recreate accounts, so if you had an account before, you'll need to contact me for the new password. Also, if anyone would like an account, please let me know and I'll create that for you.

Not to worry. When the production portal is rolled out, it will be connected to your ldap account, and you won't have to create anything.

I'm back to working on the portal. I've been digging deeper into SSO, as it seems like a piece of the puzzle that will be the most difficult and time consuming. I've found SUN's samples and "instructions". They're so confusing, it appears you already need to know how to do this to understand them.

Well, Travis got the portal re-installed on slider, so work resumes on the new wou portal. As I said in an earlier post on the portal, it will eventually be on sundown. Slider is just the testing grounds. No one as yet has an account, except for a test user, however, if anyone would like a test account, please let me know and I can create one. The login screen is at http://slider.wou.edu/portal. Don't be surprised to see changes anytime you log in, remember, it's in development. I should have some basics up and running next week. At the moment, I'm looking into news feeds. An RSS feed should theoretically plug and play, but it's not playing very nicely, so I'll have to do some tweaking with the xls file, which formats the actual RSS file to look good in a web browser, much like CSS does for an HTML page. If you have any RSS feeds you would like to see included, such as CNN RSS, please comment to this post.

My major project right now is the new portal. You may wonder what a portal is and how it's of any interest to you. You get the same data, applications, setup everywhere and anywhere! New computer, moved office, working from home, business travel, even around the world. Using SRA(Secure Remote Access), users can securely access our network and its services over the Internet, including web applications, legacy apps and access to file systems (like VPN).