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Case Western Reserve University: Expanding Access, Extending Boundaries

2/27/2003

In the version 2.0 release, scheduled to launch this year, the university plans to expand MyCWRU to include portlets to enable faculty and administrators with an executive dashboard that delivers critical decision-making tools. These include one-touch dynamic access to key reports, integrated access to course information, a personalized calendar, and e-mail. In addition, the portal is scheduled to deliver innovative and personalized support for ongoing faculty research activities, integrating with libraries and databases related to each faculty member's ongoing research interests—essentially delivering a customized university research library to the desktop. Other features of the version 2.0 release include wireless access, streaming video, IP telephony, instant messaging, and other features requested by student and faculty focus groups.

Innovative Infrastructure
The MyCWRU portal taps the power of the Oracle Database bundled with the portal technology within the Oracle9i Application Server. It also incorporates Campus Athena, a Web services middleware or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) framework that facilitates the real-time integration of higher education enterprise systems.

Case Western Reserve University began to build the MyCWRU portal in April 2002. The university was looking for a standards-based enterprise portal solution that it could seamlessly integrate with its enterprise e-mail system, calendaring system, learning management system, home-grown legacy student information system, and authentication and authorization systems. These enterprise systems were functioning primarily as stand-alone applications. They either did not interact with one another or interacted with each other via a home-grown integration process.

CWRU was looking to build a portal that would provide users with "single sign-on" access to the student information, learning management, e-mail, calendaring, and authentication and authorization systems, and function as one integrated, interoperable and CWRU-branded environment. The university also wanted to move toward a robust Web services integration standards of SOAP/XML for Middleware or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to guarantee that all of the systems would "talk to each other" in an intelligent and secure fashion behind the scenes. For example, CWRU envisioned a portal that would use Web services standards to ensure that, when a student added or dropped a class in the student information system, the learning management system would also automatically reflect this change. Cost, return on investment (RoI) and scalability were also major considerations in selecting technology solutions and partners.

After evaluating several technology options, CWRU selected the portal technology within the Oracle9i Application Server coupled with the Campus Athena Web services middleware. The Oracle portal solution provides an extensible framework that integrates Web-based resources (applications, business intelligence reports, Web pages, and syndicated content feeds) within standardized, reusable information components. The framework also provides single sign-on, content classification, enterprise search, directory integration, and access control.



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