Luminis Consulting
July 15, 2007 | 1 Comment
I’ve been serving as the portal administrator at Plymouth State University since 2003. I headed their conversion from Campus Pipeline to Luminis III.2 in 2004. On May 28th we were (most likely) the first institution to deploy Luminis IV in production.
During this time, one of the most satisfying aspects of my job has been talking with other schools. It has often been my pleasure to talk with schools as they first start working with Luminis, or are doing an upgrade, or are just struggling with something new they would like to do with the platform.
Out of one of these conversations I was fortunate enough to establish a more in depth relationship with the University of San Diego. This eventually turned into a consulting engagement which I enjoyed immensely. I was able to help them get their newly hired portal administrator up to speed as well as assist in a number of small modifications and customizations. It also gave me the chance to visit their beautiful campus.
SunGardHE offers a number of options for consulting engagements, but they are very busy. It can often be difficult to get someone, especially for small things, and more challenging if you want them quickly. This is where I can offer my services as a Luminis Consultant.
To highlight my qualifications a bit more, I have presented on Luminis a number of times: LDI Implementation Case Study at PSU at Summit 2005, Implement and Deploy Banner Channels (top five Summit 2006 presentation), LDI Implementation Tips and Tricks, Alumni are Coming and Drag and Drop Channels/Statistics Gathering (Developers Lounge) at Summit 2006, Implement and Deploy Banner Channels and Extending SSO with CAS at Summit 2007, and more!
As always, I’m happy to talk with any school about any Luminis related topic, if however, you are looking for more than a couple conversations, I am available for consulting.
Tags: banner, campus pipeline, cas, channels, consultant, consulting, higher ed, higher education, integration, ldi, luminis, resume, single sign on, sso, summit, sungard, sungardhe, yalecas
US Federal E-Authentication and Higher Education
March 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment
The United States federal government has been working on an E-Authentication project actively since 2003 in response to the E-Government Act of 2002. Movement has been slow, but there are many federal agencies now leveraging this infrastructure in a federated manner. For more details about the initiative, there is the publicly available Burton Group Report on the Federal E-Authentication Initiative. For an updated view see the GCN article, E-Authentication maps out its future.
Since then, there has been work to bridge both Liberty Alliance and Shibboleth-based federations with the e-Government services. Involvement also extends to the Post Secondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC) who is working with all these organizations to assure higher education is appropriately represented. Certainly NSF Fastlane and Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) seem like the most obvious first candidates to work with higher education institutions.
With all the activity surrounding the federal government deploying these services in a federated method, institutions should definitely be getting their internal infrastructure in place to support and interoperate with one of the major federations (InCommon, eGovernment, etc).
Tags: "liberty alliance", act, authentication, burton group, e-authentication, eauth, eauthentication, egovernment, fafsa, fastlane, federal, federated, federation, financial aid, gcn, government, higher education, identity, identity management, idm, incommon, initiative, liberty, pesc, pki, shibboleth
Summit 2006, A Great Success
June 14, 2006 | 7 Comments
In April Plymouth State University had a large showing at SunGard Higher Education Summit 2006. In fact, 13 PSU staff attended and gave 14 presentations.
While at Summit in Orlando it quickly became clear that PSU was a significant presence at the 7000+ attendee conference. A fairly substantial accomplishment for a small, public institution in northern New Hampshire. As a whole the conference was an amazing experience for many of us. We learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and felt a bit like rock stars for 3 days.
This was my third Summit attendance and the second time I was presenting. I personally had the pleasure of giving four presentations over the course of this conference. Two which were normal solo presentations, one less formal in the developers lounge, and a third with my colleagues Ken Kochien and Jen Hall. Being able to interact with this many people with great ideas, questions and general excitement was exhilarating.
New at Summit this year was the Luminis Developer’s lounge which was primarily organized by Jon Wheat of Messiah College and founder of the Luminis Developer’s Network. As far as I could tell, the lounge was a great success where many of us engaged in informal in depth discussions among each other and with some significant SunGard representatives including Vishal Goenka and Josh Horner. My time spent in the lounge was amazingly valuable and insightful.
I’m finally getting around to writing this article because I was notified today about the results of one of my two official solo presentations. Specifically in reference to the presentation titled Implement and Deploy Banner Channels. Apparently reviews on that presentation were exceptional, placing me in the top five Summit 2006 presentations. I left that presentation feeling good about it, but I was not aware it was that well received. As part of this recognition, I have been awarded a free 4 night stay in one of the Summit hotels for Summit 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada on March 19-22.
I figure I can take a brief opportunity to have a big head and share a subset of the comment feedback I received from the session evaluations:
- Best session yet. Did exactly what it said on the tin!
- Excellent Speaker–good topic–interesting discussion.
- Great presenter. Good info. Would have liked to see a few more technical examples. Good overview of deployment issues.
- He answered all my questions and saved me valuable time in guess work
- I found this presentation very helpful and found the speaker easy to identify with.
- Presenter seem real knowledgeable on the topic and seemed to appeal to many of the techies in the room.
- Totally relevent to where we are and what our issues are! Thanks!
- Very interesting and informative — hopefully this will help us dodge a few of these “gotchas”. Thanks!
- very knowledgable about issues that may be encountered, good advice on how to approach them for quicker resolution
- very well done, zach. timely topic, nicely presented.
- Zach held the best session I have been to all conference.
- Zachary is the Best presenter of the conference! Great presence with his audience!
- Zachary Tirrell was an excellent presenter, made the topic very interesting.
OK, so that is enough warm fuzzies to make me feel guilty about even posting it. Regardless, I have to say I would not have had any where near the success I have enjoyed with this if not for the support of the amazing MIS team I work with. Additionally, all aspects of ITS make any success we have with ventures like Luminis possible.
Summit 2006 rocked. From the great number of presentation we gave on varying topics, our Dan-athon through the Disney parks, the hilarious quotes extracted from our hugely entertaining group, to Laurianne’s participation in the closing session improv, Summit 2006 was a huge success for Plymouth State, my colleagues, and me personally. Here’s looking forward to Summit 2007 in Las Vegas!
Tags: conference, higher education, jon wheat, ldn, luminis, luminis developer's network, plymouth state university, presentation, sct, summit, sungard, sungard higher education, Zachary Tirrell
Great New Emerging Blogs
May 24, 2006 | 23 Comments
Over the last few months a few friends and colleagues have started their own blogs. Since then each has put out some fantastic articles and I wanted to take an opportunity to summarize why these are great blogs and highlight my favorite three stories from each.
Ken’s TEK
Ken is my manager at Plymouth State University. His history of forward thinking in the higher education technology space has continued to keep PSU out in front of the University System of NH’s other schools as well as many other higher education institutions. Trust me, I’m not just saying this because he’s my boss, when Ken finally gets a full handle on blogging, we’ll look back on his stories as clear indicators on what is what with higher education technology.
Pomp, Circumstance and Gonfalons
In response to a perceived lack of grandeur during the 2004 Plymouth graduation Ken suggested addition of gonfalons which went over amazingly in 2005. They were again used successfully in 2006. He explains the significance of gonfalons in this article.
Google Trends - Veeerrrryyy Interesting
A great use case for another one of Google’s sweet tools.
SunGardHE Summit Snap Shots
Images from our hugely successful trip to Summit 2006.
Ken has a pile of other great articles on identity management, business intelligence, vodcasts, online education, and more.
Changing gears, this is Randy’s second run at OS. His first incarnation was pretty cool, but this new one blows that old one away. I just hope if this one goes away, all the content doesn’t go with it… again… Randy is a DC comic book loving geek through and through. Me being a Marvel guy, this gives me some great insight on how the lesser half of the comic world thinks.
Seremuppety
An amazingly hilarious parody of Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity done with muppets.
Important Survival Information!
One of the …
Superman: A true Hero will fly again! and Superman’s New Look
Randy is far more excited about the new Superman movie than I am. I appreciate his level of enthusiasm, it is what has kept me paying attention to this movie.
Why is there nothing about Infinite Crisis on his blog yet?
Watersedge
Dan Bramer is the newest in this crowd, but shows great potential. Dan grasps new ideas quickly and is able to convert them into entertaining and insightful ways. Currently there is a lot of WebCT info that is finally being documented. I can’t wait to see what he does when he’s tasked with supporting Luminis and Oracle HTMLdb ongoing.
Tracking Flights in 3D with Google Earth
How flippin’ sweet is this?!? Google Earth is such an awesome application. I love when people take advantage of this application as a platform for additional functionality.
WebCT: The 6 day work week
Here’s Dan flexing his capable WebCT muscles. An insightful extract of previously unmined data.
Dan-a-thon: Disclaimer
An amusing defensive stance after being a key component of one of the most fun trips I’ve ever been on in my life. Dan drove our group through Disney at a break-neck pace, allowing us to see more than we would have expected on such a short trip.
I have to throw an honorable mention to his first story though, Ode to the ‘Construction Guy’, go read this it’s funny as hell.
So, that’s my summary. Check these blogs out and I hope you enjoy them half as much as I do. As for you three, if you’re reading this, keep up the good work.
Tags: blogging, blogs, business intelligence, comic books, comics, daniel bramer, firefly, gonfalon, gonfalons, Google Earth, higher education, identity management, jpss whedon, ken kochien, ken's tek, online education, optimal stupidity, randy szabadics, seremuppety, serenity, summit, sungard, sungardhe, superman, vodcasts, watersedge, webct
Leveraging CAS with Luminis
March 28, 2006 | 4 Comments
In SunGard Higher Education's Luminis product one of the many add-on packages you can install is CAS support. CAS is an acronym for Central Authentication Service. This WebISO solution is one of the most common in higher education. CAS was created originally by Yale, but ongoing support has been taken over by JA-SIG. When the CAS package is installed in Luminis, it makes Luminis act as a CAS authentication provider. Coupled with this built-in Luminis support, we use a CAS library called phpCAS that adds to the simplicity of deploying this within our environment.
Time and again, CAS has been proven an effective and simple way for us to quickly drop authentication ability into our homegrown PHP applications. Once a function was developed, this was easily reused across dozens of applications within a few short months. The ease of deployment made it easy to convince various developers to switch from custom authentication schemes.
In a PHP application on any of the servers in your environment you can do something like the following:
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<?php
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function casify()
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{
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// import phpCAS lib (http://esup-phpcas.sourceforge.net/)
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include_once($GLOBALS['INCLUDES'].'/cas/CAS.php');
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// initialize phpCAS
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phpCAS::client(CAS_VERSION_2_0,'luminis.institution.edu',443,'cas/');
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// check CAS authentication
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phpCAS::forceAuthentication();
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// at this step, the user has been authenticated by the CAS server
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// and the user's login name can be read with phpCAS::getUser().
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return phpCAS::getUser();
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}
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$username = casify();
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// nothing past the execution of casify() would occur without acquiring a valid CAS ticket
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?>
Note: the preceding code is an example. There is more sophisticated functionality that can be accomplished using CAS, this is merely a starting point for people interested in this WebISO technology.
Tags: cas, development, education, higher education, identity management, jasig, luminis, php, phpcas, security, sungard, sungard higher education, web development, yale, yalecas
Ultimate Directory of Services
March 13, 2006 | 1 Comment
With the many diverse services we offer our users in higher education providing an easy way to find them can often be a challenge. Many institutions have attacked this issue in a series of ways varying degrees of success. It was with this in mind that I'm sure led Middlebury College to develop a service they call "Go".
This creative solution basically attachs services to keywords to services. These keywords can then be simply appended to the URL 'go.middlebury.edu' or just 'go' on campus. For example, someone on campus can simply type 'go/registrar' and immediately get where they want to go. According to some of their IT guys, this idea started quietly and gradually. The underground movement soon picked up and go became a very poplular service. I can see why.
As an added benefit, they have created a "GOtionary" which is presented to you if you enter a keyword they do not have linked to a service, or you can simply browse it by go directly to go. To add to the power of this system, Middlebury also solicits constant feedback about what should be added to their "GOtionary". They've also created a browser toolbar to bubble up the power of go into their users browsers.
A more common approach for many institutions is to build a monolithic portal application structure where all the various services are linked in (hopefully) appropriate locations. This is a model we at Plymouth State University have operated under for years. This approach has been successful for us, but I think it is interesting to compare the two. These are the questions I ask anyone reading:
Which is more scalable?
Which is more flexible?
Which is more user-centered?
Which rewards repeat users?
Which most intuitive?
What are the learning curves for each, if any?
Are there major drawbacks to one over the other?
Are there major benefits to one that I am glazing over?
Which is the right solution?
Remember, we're talking purely about findability of services and ease of accessing them. Not about integration, security, identity management, or any of these types of things.
Tags: directory, findability, higher education, keyword, keywords, middlebury, portal, web, web development, web portal, web20, web_20
Leveraging Varying Level of Assurance
March 9, 2006 | 2 Comments
In higher education we all seem to struggle, at least a bit, with coupling together our many varied web services and applications. Part of the difficulty I see is the varied needs for how secure each of the services we delever need to be.
A common reaction to this is to lock things down tightly, requiring your users to reauthenticate on a regular basis to access even the most trivial of services. In this situation users feel encumbered by the security and are less satisfied using these services. Face it, who doesn't love sites that know who we are and let us do the things we expect when we go back? (ex. Wordpress, Gmail, Flickr, Amazon, etc)
For the purposes of this article, I am defining level of assurance as how sure we are that the user on the other end of the browser is who we think they are.
I imagine an ideal situation where we identify a required level of assurance for each service, then check against an appropriate indicator.
A preliminary structure for varying levels of assurance:
| LOA | Who/How? | Example Services |
|---|---|---|
| Level 0 | Anonymous | Homepage, various public facing pages, etc |
| Level 1 | Long term cookie | Targeted Announcements, News Reader, Personalized Content, Bookmarks, etc |
| Level 2 | Active browser session or desktop domain login |
Email, Learning Management System, Calendar, Groups Tool, etc |
| Level 3 | 30 minute session | Financial Information, Grades, Address Information, etc |
| Level 4 | Every usage | Password change, others? |
In this scenario, users would be asked for credentials less frequently for less secure needs. This in turn encourages them to use many of these types of applications more frequently. In those less secure applications, "ticklers" can be placed encouraging them to register for classes, update address information, or check in on classes in the learning management system all as appropriate. This allows us to draw users into the more secure areas just like Amazon draws us into making a purchase, but always allows us to place things in our shopping cart.
Tags: browser, higher education, identity, identity management, level of assurance, loa, password, portal, session