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
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
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