Unicon Adds Portlet Updates to Open Source uPortal

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 03/12/12

Unicon, an IT consulting company that specializes in developing open source software for education, has added 20 portlet enhancements to the Jasig uPortal project. Jasig is a consortium of schools and companies that sponsor open source software projects for higher education. uPortal is an open source portal framework for use by institutions to house software components, such as a Facebook connection, a photo viewer, or a "MyCourses" link to a course management system. These are known as "portlets."

The Unicon contributions, which include technical fixes, feature enhancements, improvements, and new functions, surfaced in development work performed for clients and then were contributed back to the uPortal community. They include portlet updates for announcements, feedback, email preview, simple content management, widget display, and weather reporting.

"Unicon's involvement in the Jasig uPortal project is an example of how commercial entities contribute to a vibrant open source community that creates and sustains solutions for higher education," said Patty Gertz, Executive Director of Jasig.

These portlets are available for download at wiki.jasig.org.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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