Bork and Me: Summit 2005
October 9, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Dee built the above Jib Jab video of Matt and me at “Summit 2005″ (which was in Hawaii).
All I can say is awesome.
Tags: dee, hawaii, jib jab, mandy mag, mandymag, summit, summit 2005
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
2006 in Review: Personal Top 10
December 31, 2006 | Leave a Comment
In general I don’t directly blog much about my personal life. However, I think it is nice to look back at the year and remember the big things that happened. With that in my mind here is my top 10 list of most significant personal events and whatnot from 2006.
10 - Had a new roof put on our house
We hired Black Ox Roofing to put a standing seam metal roof on our house. They did a fantastic job and I will be much more comfortable this winter knowing we should be free from leaks.
9 - Upgraded our living room
I’m starting small here, but I do spend a lot of time each day in my living room. Early in the year my mother repainted our living room as a favor during her February school break. This lead us to rearranging the furniture in a way that greatly enhances flow and conversation. Later we bought a new Samsung 42″ DLP projection TV and a couch, chair, and ottoman set. We also rewired the connectivity between my Mac and the TV so no more wires run across the floor. As a whole all these changes have created a much more habitable and comfortable living room experience. Most of this work was done in preparation for our new baby and the extended time we would be spending hanging around in the living room.
8 - Attended and presented at SunGard HE Northeast Conference in Lake George, NY
I presented on three topics at SunGardHE’s brand new northeast regional conference. The topics were: Collecting Luminis Statistics, Extending SSO - CAS in Luminis, and Implement and Deploy Banner Channels. It is always fun to present and I had great attendance at my various sessions. In addition, the sections I attended were informative and generally well presented. This conference should be great for SunGard HE clients.
7 - Attended CAMP Shibboleth in Burlington, VT
Educause puts on a pretty good show and I certainly learned a great deal from this one. Shibboleth and identity management as a whole are important topics for me. I hope to be able to leverage much of what I learned from this conference to get centralized authorization and federated single sign-on in place at Plymouth State University.
6 - Was introduced to JQuery
After attending the Ajax Experience, Matt introduced me to JQuery. This is the ideal JavaScript toolkit for how I like code to be structured. This new technology in my toolkit is already greatly effecting what I am capable of creating and maintaining. As I become more proficient, I expect my love of JQuery to grow even further.
5 - Blog became trafficked and profitable
I now have over 400 posts and my daily numbers according to Bsuite dance around the 20k mark. I am getting a fair number of comments. In general, this blog has become a highly satisfying piece of my life. In addition I am making a reasonable amount of money doing it, allowing me to fund other entertainment like comics, movies, and video games.
4 - Attended and presented at SunGard HE Summit in Orlando, FL
See my previous post for all the details.
3 - Cruised the Caribbean with my wife and my family
In the spring my parents, my brother and his wife, my aunt and uncle, and my wife and I travelled together to the Caribbean on a cruise. We visited Puerto Rico, Saint Thomas, Dominica, Barbados, and Aruba. I could not have asked for a more entertaining group of people to travel with. The things we saw and experiences we had will forever remain significant in my life.
2 - Found out we were having a baby
Early this year we learned my wife was pregnant and we were having our first baby. This is an amazingly significant milestone in our lives. My wife’s pregnancy went very well, and you can read her week by week experiences on her blog, Being Sara.
1 - Xander was born
At 6:39 pm on Wednesday September 20th my first born son arrived, Alexander “Xander” Grady Tirrell. He weighed 8 lbs 2 oz and was 20.5″ long. After a long labor he was finally born cesarian. He is happy and healthy. As part of his coming into the world, I have not been at work much. I took 6 weeks when he was born followed by a longer leave from November 17th through January 2nd. I have been fortunate to spend a great deal of time with the little guy now when it is so important.
So that’s it. There is my year in top 10 summary style. It’s been exceptional.
Tags: baby, being sara, caribbean, identity management, javascript, jquery, shibboleth, summit
Summit 2007 Presentation Proposals
October 11, 2006 | 1 Comment
It’s that time of year again. I’ve updated my bio and tweaked a few of the proposals I’ve submitted in previous years. I’m submitting fewer this year than past years as many of my responsibilities in the past year have swayed away from Luminis, reducing it’s core status in my workload.
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. In the past couple years Zach has become increasingly involved with Summit events. At Summit 2005, Zach presented “LDI Implementation Tips and Tricks”. This presentation was repeated at Summit 2006 as well as a new presentation, “Implement and Deploy Banner Channels”, which was voted in the top 5 by attending reviewers. While at Summit 2006, Zach also co-presented “Alumni Are Coming! Luminis ROI”. Finally, he hosted an informal session in the Luminis Developer’s Lounge where he covered statistics tracking and drag and drop channels within Luminis.
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.
This is a repeat from last year
Collecting Luminis Statistics
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. These numbers are supplemented with other third party statistic tracking utilities. 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.
Extending SSO - CAS in Luminis
One of the most common WebISO solutions is the Central Authentication Service (CAS) developed by Yale. In Luminis III.2 CAS became available as an installable module. Learn how to get CAS 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 topic is for technical audiences
Tags: banner, banner channels, cas, channel, channels, luminis, portal, portal administrator, RDBMSStatsRecorder, single sign on, sso, summit, sungard, sungardhe, web developer, yalecas
Shibboleth For AuthZ
June 27, 2006 | 1 Comment
I had the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time discussing Shibboleth with Vishal Goenka and Josh Horner while I was at Summit 2006 in Orlando. I wanted to know about the support for Shibboleth that was supposed to be coming in a future version of Luminis and a bit about how it will work. During this discussion it became clear to me that Shibboleth’s core ability for attribute release allows applications to get the information they need to make authorization (authZ) decisions.
Until this point I had only though of Shibb as a solution for inter-organizational web-based single-sign on (Federated SSO or WebISO or WebSSO). I knew I could use Shibboleth internally to serve as my WebSSO, but we already have a hugely successful implementation of CAS in our environment. Additionally I haven’t been able to point at a killer application of the federated WebSSO ability. I knew this driver would be coming, but without immediate demand I was luke warm on Shibboleth.
However, the ability to use Shibboleth internally as a central authority for attribute release and in turn a consistent way of doing centralized AuthZ is a gigantically huge win for us. No longer will every homegrown application need to establish it’s own authorization layer with associated interfaces for maintaining that data. Now I have a serious driver for getting Shibboleth in our environment as soon as possible.
So that’s the lead-in to why Ted Wisniewski, Ken Kochien, and I are attending CAMP Shibboleth: Enabling Campus and Federated Single Sign-On.
Tags: authentication, authorization, camp_062, federated, federation, josh horner, shibb, shibboleth, single sign on, sso, summit, vishal goenka, webiso, websso
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