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
Summit 2006 Presentation Proposals
October 3, 2005 | 2 Comments
I finally put together all my material to submit proposals for Summit presentations. I looked back at what we’ve been doing in the portal this year and the following is what I came up with. Overall it’s been a busy year, I was surprised to come up with as many as I did.
My Title: Portal Administrator and Senior Web Developer
My Bio
Zach Tirrell is from Plymouth State University in northern New Hampshire. Zach is both portal administrator and senior web developer for the institution. The main areas of his concentration revolve around integrating systems and identity management, Luminis has become a perfect enabler of this. He is often looking to get just a bit more out of Luminis than what is delivered.
Collecting Stats in Luminis
By leveraging the underlying UPortal infrastructure, learn how to take advantage of RDBMSStatsRecorder to generate detailed numbers on who is logging in, logging out, how often, and by role. You can then use these numbers to better understand how effective your portal strategy is. Tracking user adoption and growth over time becomes essential to decision making about the portal.
This presentation is for technical audiences.
YaleCAS in Luminis
One of the most common WebISO solutions is the Central Authentication Service developed by Yale (YaleCAS). In Luminis III.2 CAS became available as an installable module. Learn how to get YaleCAS installed, configured, and where it might fit in your organization. See how Plymouth State University has leveraged the phpCAS libraries to CAS’ify all their internally developed PHP web applications as well as a few third-party ones. What’s best, it only takes a couple lines of code!
This presentation is for technical audiences.
Luminis and Identity Management
While deploying Luminis, or maybe immediately after, lots of questions arise related to identity management. Are you using a central authentication point like LDAP or Active Directory? How do technologies like CPIP or YaleCAS fit into your authentication scheme? What applications should and can use SSO? Are you centrally managing authorization? Is shibboleth something you should be thinking about? How is your password policy? What’s you level of assurance on accounts you have assigned? All these questions and more will be discussed. Come prepared for lots of crowd participation.
LDI Implementation Tips and Tricks
Plymouth State University is starting to reap the rewards of its integrated campus portal strategy. PSU started its Banner migration in 2001, deployed Campus Platform 3 with its legacy SIS in 2002, publicly deployed Banner in 2003, and in 2004 with the migration to Luminis and implementation of LDI for eLearning, has finally reached “critical mass.” Luminis provides the infrastructure and LDI provides the glue that connects Banner, WebCT, the library, and other services. The presentation details Plymouth State University’s implementation and discusses the problems and solutions we faced along the way, with an emphasis on LDI and Luminis. Plymouth State has used this technology to realize the benefits of a unified digital campus.
This is a repeat from last year
Implement and Deploy Banner Channels
Banner 7 comes with a huge pile of exciting new channels. These channels greatly leverage the relationship between Luminis and Banner, however, implementation is complicated and deployment even more so. Banner channels are fantastic, but they need to be rolled out carefully. Plymouth State University has already run this gauntlet, come hear some of the concerns and pitfalls so you can avoid them yourself.
Tags: active directory, banner, campus portal, cas, channel, channels, identity management, integrate, integrated, integration, ldap, luminis, php, plymouth state university, portal, sct, sso, summit, sungard, sungardsct, tirrell, webiso, yalecas, Zach Tirrell, Zachary Tirrell
Single Sign-On Definition
August 9, 2005 | 17 Comments
At a SunGardSCT training there was a slide with a nice, concise definition of single sign-on or SSO.
Single Sign-On:
One userid, one password, entered one time, with passage allowed from one system to another without interruption
Sometimes there is debate over the meaning of the term, I accept this definition as true, and all further references I make henceforth will be based off this.
Tags: definition, identity management, integration, single sign on, sso
SunGard SCT Summit 2005 Presentation
July 18, 2005 | 6 Comments
Earlier this year I presented at Summit in Hawaii on Plymouth State University’s implementation of LDI for eLearning. LDI stands for Luminis Data Integration. Basically we use LDI for semi-realtime data integration and SSO between Banner, WebCT and Luminis.
A few people have requested a copy of my presentation, so here it is: LDI Implementation Case Study at PSU
Tags: banner, integration, ldi, ldis, luminis, luminis data integration suite, portal, presentation, sso, sungardsct, uportal, webct
Library Metasearching and Digital Collections
July 13, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Last week I attended two vendor demos in response to a University System of NH RFP. The two vendors were exLibris and Endeavor. In short, USNH is looking for two things: a solution for managing digital collections at the various schools in the university system and a utility for doing metasearching to give one-stop access to the various resources in the library’s many digital collections. Now I am not a librarian, nor all that familiar with library technology or processes. I was participating here purely from a technology standpoint, so in turn, anything I state here is from that angle.
One of our biggest needs is the ability to integrate the products with our existing university portal, SunGardSCT Luminis. By integration we really have three distinct pieces to this: Single Sign On (SSO), look and feel customization, and data exchange. From my perspective, those are listed in order of descending importance. I also care about APIs so the product can be extended and reused in ways the original company did not imagine. Last but not least, I care about usability. If untrained users cannot pick up the product and feel successful using it, they won’t.
Endeavor
The first vendor was Endeavor. Their two products are ENCompass and LinkFinderPlus.
LinkFinderPlus has great ability to allow for interface customization due to its use of XSLT. Basically you change the XSLT and you can make the interface look and act however you want. There is currently no built-in way to support SSO, but they believe it would not be difficult to build an extension. Additionally, they intend on supporting Shibboleth within the year. Depending on how they implement Shib, it could be good or bad… LinkFinderPlus doesn’t have any data per se, so data exchange is not necessary.
They do have APIs, sort of. Basically, if you don’t apply an XSLT, then you have straight XML and can interpret it like you would REST. As far as I’m concerned this is a great solution, even if it does seem like a “happy coincidence” feature.
ENCompass does have data, but no clear way to exchange it cleanly, not that I can imagine a need for this. The web interface again is XSLT customizable. The “archivers” interface is client side, which seems to work out quite nicely. I thought I’d be opposed to this, but recently my use of utilities like ecto and the Gallery plugins has me thinking differently. It does not yet support JPEG 2000, which is really important for archiving things like maps or murals which need to exist in extremely high resolutions to be able to see any of the useful details. It is also passing of the responsibility of all role and user identification to a directory or your ILS. This is a great step in the realm of identity management.
As a final note on Endeavor, all their products claim to be usability tested in their entirety. The interfaces are simple, could use a bit of work, but are adequate.
Final Grades:
Portal Integration: D
APIs: B
Usability: B
exLibris
My main impression of exLibris is that there are more bells and whistles. They seem to be a technology centered company and like most, suffer a bit from feature creep. Many of their interfaces have a lot of options that could leave users wondering what they are doing and feeling lost. Their two products are called MetaLib (with SFX) and DigiTool.
MetaLib (with SFX) is where the bells and whistles are really obvious. There are varying degrees of increased complexity in the interface depending on how deep you go. This is great for the librarians, but unlikely that students would use it. In fact Casey at MaisonBisson, also in attendance with me, states that “only 0.0067% (YES, less than a hundredth of a percent!) of the searches on our OPAC get “limitedâ€? to specific languages, locations, dates, or material types” in his article The High Cost Of Metasearch For Libraries. The interface seems to be minimally customizable, limited to headers, footers, and CSSS. However, there are “real” APIs for MetaLib, a separate product they call XServer. It is well documented and seems to be just the right amount of useful, but more cumbersome than a mere REST-like interface.
As for SSO, they currently support Shib, but it is unclear if that is as a destination or origin. On a much more degrading note, they had never heard of SunGardSCT Luminis or UPortal, so their knowledge of the portal space, specifically in higher-ed is limited at best.
DigiTool is purely web based and looks and functions adequately. Once again customization is limited. They do have JPEG 2000 support though, so thats a big plus. They claim to authenticate against an LDAP, but other than that, the identity management opportunities are limited at best. Usability seems low all around on these applications.
Final Grades:
Portal Integration: C
APIs: B
Usability: D
From the grades I gave, none of these are ideal. Read Casey’s assessment for more detail about where the metasearching falls down. I just wish the could make it more like Google Scholar or A9. My major question is how do these digital archives provide a solution better than DSpace? Check out the many existing, live, DSpace instances. DSpace is free and in turn has not got an equal seat at the table. It is scary how money often corrupts decisions like this.
Tags: a9, api, digital archive, endeavor, exlibris, google scholar, identity management, integration, jpeg2000, libraries, library, library systems, metasearch, metasearching, portal, REST, search technology, shibboleth, shibbolith, usability
Luminis Developers Network
June 21, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Those who know me already know I work for Plymouth State University in Plymouth, NH. My unofficial title is Web Developer and I spend a lot of time developing web applications for internal audiences. In addition to my development duties, I also specialize in integrating separate software systems. Enter the portal. Most of my work revolves around one product, Luminis made by SunGard SCT. This portal solution is based off the open-source product UPortal. Our implementation is dubbed myPlymouth.
On to my point… Doing development for myPlymouth on the Luminis platform became far more interesting in December of last year when Jon Wheat of Messiah College created the Luminis Developers Network (aka LDN, aka LumDev). Suddenly I had a whole community of developers doing similar jobs as me, wanting to enhance to product in similar way, and with an easy way to collaborate on these efforts.
My excitement about LDN has caused me to shamelessly promote the site on many occasions. In Hawaii at Summit, in Boston during a presentation, as well as in every communication I’ve had with anyone even remotely interested in Luminis.
Anyway, I post on LDN often and in the future will likely syndicate my posts here. The following bulleted list summarizes the posts I originated there.
- Syndicating LDN in Luminis III.2 (12/20/04) - my first post, I found it ironic that the LDN RSS did not properly syndicate inside Luminis. Jon got it fixed though.
- Statistics (1/21/05) - as I began researching a way to get stats, I requested ideas on how to accomplish this.
- Classifieds Channel - How To (1/27/05) - step by step instructions on how to get the UPortal communities “Classifieds Channel” implemented in Luminis.
- My Calendar Channel (2/20/05) - a request for info on how to hack the delivered calendar channel
- Summit ‘05 Lum Dev Meetup (3/2/05) - a request to meetup with anyone from LDN who was interested while I was in Hawaii. (I ended up meeting a few and recruiting more. For related escapades, register at LDN and read these comments)
- Luminis Statistics from Uportal (4/12/05) - an overview of how to extract statistics from the underlying UPortal infrastructure.
- YaleCAS (4/18/05) - implementation details and excitement about YaleCAS, a great tool for SSO integration with homegrown apps, especially PHP based apps using phpCAS.
- Site Demos/Guest Logins (5/2/05) - a request for demo logins from the community
- CampusEAI Consortium (6/7/05) - a question to the community about CampusEAI. I’m still curious about this.
- Northeast SCT Luminis Recruitment/Business Case (6/10/05) - summarizes the presentation I attended and presented in recently in Boston.
Obviously I’ve also commented on a ton of other people’s posts, but that is less necessary for me to summarize. Though I will occasionally post summaries of other posts I find particularly intriguing.
Tags: cas, higher education, integration, luminis, portal, sct, sso, sungardsct, uportal, yalecas