Johns Hopkins Collaborates with Unicon on Extensions to uPortal

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/22/08

The IT staff at Johns Hopkins University has completed a collaborative project with Unicon for an upgrade to the uPortal 3 open source enterprise portal. uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher education. It's built using Java, XML, JSP, and J2EE.

As part of the upgrade process, the university also contracted with Unicon to develop uPortal 3 feature enhancements. Johns Hopkins went live with the uPortal 3 upgrade in August 2008 and contributed the newly developed enhancements, including the following, back to the open source community:

• Usability evaluation and design:
• A fragment administration portlet; and
• Theme/skin implementations.

Unicon provides open source enterprise portals, applications, and technology consulting for higher education clients. Besides uPortal development, the company is involved in Sakai, Central Authentication Service (CAS), and Zimbra projects.