THE GREEK UNIVERSITIES INTO THE DIGITAL WORLD THE U-PORTAL CASE STUDY

THE GREEK UNIVERSITIES INTO THE DIGITAL WORLD THE U-PORTAL CASE STUDY Evangelos Vlachogiannis, Nikos Viorres Dept. of Product and Systems Design Engineering University of the Aegean, Syros GR-84100, Greece {evlach;nviorres}@aegean.gr Spiros Bolis Network Operations Center University of Athens Athens GR-15784, Greece sbol@noc.uoa.gr, Ophelia Neofytou Center of Communications & Networking University of Crete Heraklio GR-71409 Greece ophelia@ucnet.uoc.gr Abstract This paper briefly presents part of the work performed within the e- University project: a Greek national project aiming to digitalize administrative activities of the Greek universities. The common gateway to e-university is a web portal, the U-portal. This paper discusses the design and implementation of the U-portal infrastructure that is intended to be the central hub of the Greek Universities for students, academic staff and public. The design and implementation approach of the U-Portal were based on investigation of the current state of the web portal technology on both national and international level, through literature research and surveys on institutional level. An architecture based on open source technologies has been adopted and developed. Introduction The academic process in the corpus of universities is often being distracted by bureaucratic procedures that moreover lead to the overspending of the national revenues and the annoyance of the interest parties. These are the primary problems that the e-university aims at facing through the simplification of bureaucratic mechanisms and the support of processes of service to the citizen, with the use of Information 1

and Communication Technologies, minimizing at the same time its response time. The action of the e-university (http://e-university.gunet.gr) concerns the digitalization of information and administration of the higher education that are provided to the citizens, e.g., students, candidate students (pupils), graduates, parents, the teaching and research personnel, contractors and suppliers. The objective of this particular action is to complete and unify the existing operations in each institution, in order to achieve a very high level of provided digital governmental for the citizens. All the subsystems of the e-university have been developed in open source software in order to be available in all the Greek academic institutions. This paper presents in the begging the identified design requirements of the U-Portal as they emerged from a survey addressed to the Greek higher degree institutions and from the literature investigation. Then, the description of the system architecture and the technological scene used for the implementation follows. Finally some conclusions and foreseen work are being discussed. The identification of the design requirements The Survey A fundamental methodological step for a successful project is always the investigation of the underling state and its connection to the emerging requirements of the design problem. In the current project, the aforementioned investigation took place primarily through a survey (questionnaires and interviews) aiming at: Collecting data about the current state; Investigating the institutions requirements for a portal infrastructure; Investigating the institutions intention for the exploitation of a portal infrastructure; Eliciting the position of the institutions about the portal paradigm and its relevant issues such as aggregation, specific requirements, evaluation criteria, cost and more. Some of the conclusions gathered through the analysis of the responses from 29 institutions (18 Universities and 11 Technological Institutes), nearly at the beginning of 2006, are the following: The notion of the term portal is not clear. Thus the it can offer are neither clear. There is no awareness of the aims and importance of Web accessibility. Most institutions offer plethora of but not in a centralized manner. 2

The fact that the offered are not adequately adopted is charged to the unwillingness of the end users. Not adequate promotion of the offered. No use of common platform. PHP seems to be the most popular technology. Institutions strongly require open source technologies. Ability for easy integration with current infrastructure like LDAP is strongly required. Most of the institutions are willing to use the U-Portal infrastructure. A central hub for offering seems to be a demand. The survey results raised some critical issues that need to be addressed during the design and implementation of the U-Portal including: The web accessibility issue seems to be a primary requirement for the design of U-Portal. Promoting a common policy would ensure the accessibility of the by people with special requirements. Currently most of the institutions already use a kind of content management system (CMS). On one hand this is reasonable as it allows for easy administration and maintenance but on the other hand the available CMS were not designed having in mind the specific requirements of an institution. This led to custom solutions that rise maintenance, extensibility and interoperability problems. The institutions in Greece seem not to cooperate with regard to their digital infrastructure and which leads to fragmentary efforts and interoperability problems. The literature investigation The portal paradigm has been used widely during the last years. This is simply obvious by the number of enterprise portals that have been appeared. According to Strauss (Strauss, 2002) the notion of portal arose due to the diverging structural, conceptual and functional characteristics of such web sites. There have appeared many definitions of the portal notion mainly due to the big competitors such as Yahoo and Excite. Recently, an IBM study argued that the conceptual confusion for the notion of the term portal has come to an end as most of the big leaders converge to the following definition: a secure point of interaction with diverse information, processes and people, personalized according to the user s requirements (IBM, 2003). In the domain of academic portals, several attempts have also been identified using the portal infrastructure as a gateway to the institutions. The specific requirements of an academic environment had to be taken into account in order to conclude to system specifications. Several movements have been identified including JA-SIG 1, PORTAL, Indiana 1 Java in Administration Special Interest Group - http://www.ja-sig.org 3

University s OneStart Portal and Santa Barbara City College s Project Redesign and Portal Development Pickett (Pickett, 2002). In addition, the literature investigation included methodologies for the product and systems design including systems thinking, contextual design and design for all. Such methodologies have been used in a conceptual level for identifying the requirements and software engineering methods (e.g. OOP, XP) have been employed in order to specify the actual requirements of the system (use cases). Furthermore, software engineering best practices and patterns have been employed for ensuring the quality of the resulting system including Separation of Concerns, Component oriented Programming, Service oriented programming, open source, Model View Controller. An important part of the research for the interoperability of the systems and thus the adoption of the project results was the identification of standards and widely used technologies. JSR-168 and WSRP (Web for remote portlets) were recognised as the most important standards considering interoperability between portal systems and their contained applications called portlets. In other words, any stakeholder intending to develop an application destined to run under the U-Portal platform needs to follow such specifications (JSR-168 for Java local portlets and WSRP for any technology remote portlets). At the end of the requirements analysis, the project partners realized a comparative evaluation of the available open source portal platforms according to several weighted criteria including maturity, extensibility, accessibility, standards, usability, documentation, support / community, portability, flexibility, management, functionality and security. The evaluation resulted in the adopted platform for the development of U- Portal; the Apache Jetspeed-2 2. The U-Portal architecture and implementation Interaction with other systems of e-university U-Portal is an infrastructure that is necessary to interoperate with other systems under the e-university framework. This section describes the interaction of U-Portal with the rest of the systems that are being developed under the e-university project as illustrated in Figure 1. As illustrated in figure, the subsystems / that are being developed for supporting specific institution s workflows are going to be implemented as portlets that will be anchored on the U-Portal interface. This is possible due to interoperability specifications like WSRP. The LDAP service will interact with the portal through queries for the authentication and authorization of the users. Finally the PKI service will provide the required infrastructure for the certification of the users and. 2 http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/ 4

LDAP e-university subsystems web Legacy system web Student Financial affairs Procureme nt Public works Administra tive affairs Research programmes Document Management e-procurement Workflow Management System U-Portal portlets web Ministry of Education / other institutions Figure 1: e-university and U-Portal U-Portal Architecture and functional requirements This section presents the actual U-Portal architecture in an abstract level in order to present the way the responsibilities (functionality) are effectively distributed to the subsystems. Doing that, some terms need to be clarified: Component: The combination of a software interface and its implementation responsible for a specific task. This allows the modification / replacement of the implementation without affecting the rest of the system. Service: A set of for an integrated solution The identification of functional requirements has been the outcome of the overall approach as described so far in previous sections and gives emphasis to the end user and to issues like usability and accessibility (WCAG1.0 A level conformance as minimum conformance requirement) (see also Vlachogiannis et al, 2005). The adopted software architecture is Service Oriented on both the service / component and the portlet (remote portlets) level. Depending on their importance, the have been classified to portlet, core and extra, as illustrated in Figure 2. All the aforementioned are using a set of the components for their implementation. The components are being managed by a component framework (like SpringFramework 3 ). Jetspeed-2 has proved suitable for such architecture and has been adopted as the basis for the U-Portal. 3 http://www.springframework.org/ 5

Core Services Portlets Services Services Extra Services Portal Components Components / Services Framework Figure 2: General U-Portal Architecture What has been achieved and what is left to be done The e-university project has recently finished its second phase that included the actual implementation of the portal infrastructure and some indicative portlets including news, calendar, FAQ and more. It is now at the stage that the (portlets) illustrated in Figure 1 are being developed. After that phase the e-university is going to move to the third final phase, the pilot phase. In this phase will participate two Universities the University of Aegean and the University of Crete and the results of the pilot will be directly applicable to the rest of the Greek Academic Community. References IBM, Portal Definition www.3ibm.com/software/webservers/portal/whatis.html (2003) Java Specification Request 168, http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 Kropp,A., Leue, C, Thompson, R. (2003). Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification; approved as an OASIS standard in August, 2003. (http://www.oasisopen.org/committees/download.php/3343/oasis-200304-wsrpspecification-1.0.pdf) Pickett, R. A. and Habre, W. B. Building portals for higher education. New Directions for Institutional Research, 113, Spring, 2002. PORTAL, Presenting national Resources To Audiences Locally: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/index.html Strauss, H. (2002). All About Web Portals: A Home Page Doth Not a Portal Make, In: Katz, R.N. et al. Web Portals in Higher Education: Technologies to Make IT Personal. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/pub5006g.pdf Vlachogiannis E., Darzentas J., Arnellos A., Spyrou T., Darzentas J. (2005). The accessibility of web applications: the case of portals and portlets - HCI Internationcal 2005, Las Vegas 6