The process by which SCT Luminis was selected by the UA Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) and the UA Office of Student and Enrollment Services (SES) as the higher education enterprise portal included:
November 2002 CampusPipeline (then a partner with SCT, later acquired by SCT) demonstrated their portal product to UA and campus officials.
April 2003 Under the direction of the Chief Information and Technology Officer and the Associate Vice President for Student and Enrollment Services, ITS staff begin a concerted effort to identify vendors offering higher education portal products.
April – June ITS conducted audio conferences with other universities to interview developers and administrators of portals.
May A Student Survey was conducted on UAonline, asking students to rate possible portal features.
http://www.alaska.edu/its/projects/MyUA/documents/StudentSurveyResults.doc
May Through contact with other universities, web searches, list servers, and literature reviews, a comprehensive list and description of higher education portal vendors was developed.
http://www.alaska.edu/its/projects/MyUA/documents/PortalVendorDescription.htm
May SCT, HP personnel traveled to Alaska to meet with ITS and SES to discuss UA’s higher education digital solution needs. SCT makes presentation on Luminis. SCT and HP executives meet with students to discuss higher education digital solution needs.
June Portals offered by Blackboard, Oracle, and SCT were chosen by ITS staff for a more in-depth review because UA currently holds licenses for each of these vendors and it was assumed UA could therefore more readily deploy their portals and be assured of some level of out-of-the-box compatibility. Also included in the review was uPortal because it is a popular, free, open source product developed by a consortium of higher education institutions – and because SCT’s Luminis portal is based on uPortal code. Another portal was chosen for consideration, offered by CampusEAI, because it was based on Oracle’s portal and because they were offering in-kind grants. A matrix comparing their features was developed.
http://www.alaska.edu/its/projects/MyUA/documents/VendorPortalFeatures.xls
June ITS staff traveled to a conference on uPortal to further its evaluation.
August Blackboard made a presentation on its new Learning Management System and Community Portal.
August SCT personnel traveled to Alaska to discuss and demonstrate Luminis
Briefs, etc. Throughout the project, briefs and presentations were periodically provided to the Regents, President, Systemwide Academic Council, Business Council, Information Technology Council, Student Services Council, and Banner Student User Groups.
Assumptions As part of the selection process, it was assumed that no portal solution would be complete “out of the box”. It was further assumed that Content Management and Application Integration are part of the discussion about portals.
Each of the products below could meet a minimum threshold of functions suitable for a MyUA portal, with each requiring varying degrees of development staff time and different technical expertise.
Synopsis The following is a synopsis of each portal product considered.
Oracle Oracle9iAS portal is a well established commercial product geared towards businesses and utilized by only a few higher education institutions. UA runs Oracle8.1.7 and will soon migrate to Oracle9i. As part of its Oracle agreement, UA already owns the portal license. However, Oracle’s portal lacks specific higher education functionality and integration to Banner or other UA systems.
Blackboard Blackboard’s portal would be relatively inexpensive to purchase. However, its functionality is not as robust as other offerings and its client list is primarily smaller universities and two year colleges. Blackboard has extended its functionality by partnering with SCT, but has no integration with Banner.
uPortal uPortal is an open source portal developed by Java Architecture-Special Interest Group (JA SIG), a university consortium. The code is available at no charge to any JA-SIG member (UA is a member). However, uPortal is a framework and its implementation and integration would require specific expertise, significant commitment of on-going staff resources, and considerable time to implement.
CampusEAI CampusEAI’s portal is based on Oracle’s (see above). CampusEAI (formerly Campus Athena) is a non-profit organization, dedicated to a community source code sharing model. It established an in-kind grant program in which awardees received an Oracle Portal license (which UA already has) and professional services for implementation at no charge. As of this writing, there are 19 member universities - some of which are presumably grantees. Each member university is required to develop channels of their choosing to contribute to a depository. Code in the depository is available only to members, who pay a licensing fee to CampusEAI. UA applied for a CampusEAI Oracle Portal in-kind grant and was selected as a recipient. However, UA declined the grant upon purchase of SCT Luminis.
Conclusions ITS determined it is technically feasible for the university to implement any of these solutions, though each product has issues as noted above. To implement Luminis, it is estimated that seven new staff need to be hired to meet a potential September 2004 Beta test deployment and January 2005 timeframe for an initial student portal deployment.
To meet the same timeline, Blackboard, Oracle, uPortal, and CampusEAI would require more than seven new staff – perhaps twice that amount – primarily due to the need to integrate with Banner and other UA systems.
Recommendation In September ITS and SES staff recommended SCT Luminis to the Chief Information and Technology Officer and the Associate Vice President. Under sole source justification, they negotiated a favorable price for SCT Luminis III Platform Premier Software License and Professional Services. The agreement was signed on September 30, 2003.
For further MyUA documentation, see www.alaska.edu/its/projects/MyUA
Prepared by UA ITS staff