UW-Madison shares in national IT award

An information technology project in which the University of Wisconsin–Madison played a key role is the winner of a major award for excellence.

EDUCAUSE, a national association of colleges, universities, and educational organizations, has given its 2007 Catalyst Award to the uPortal Project, a broad-based initiative that has developed a free, sharable Web portal for use by higher education.

"It is great to be a part of this," says Jim Helwig of UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) and project manager of DoIT’s portal infrastructure team. "uPortal continues to grow as a product and expand its user base. This is a great example of higher education institutions working well together and accomplishing a lot. The uPortal community does recognize and appreciate UW–Madison’s contributions and the contributions of others. We should feel proud."

Web portals enable higher education institutions to organize important information and deliver it online to students, faculty, staff and others based on users’ interests and access rights. Recognizing that portals and other software can be difficult and expensive to build, a group of colleges and universities (including UW–Madison) formed in the late 1990s to develop flexible, functional software to meet their common needs. Called the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG), the group made uPortal one of its early initiatives.

Since adopting uPortal as the framework for its own campus Web portal in 2003, UW–Madison has become a leader in enhancing the system. As an "open-source" system, uPortal depends on collaboration among its users for improvements and problem fixes. uPortal continues to be designed, maintained, and supported by developers at UW–Madison and elsewhere in the higher education community and by several commercial partners. Hundreds of developers from nearly as many institutions are involved.

UW-Madison contributions to uPortal have included development of several portlets, or application components that enable the portal to display for users information from dissimilar sources. For example, a weather portlet can be displayed with a stock quote portlet. Developers can add functionality to their portal by plugging in portlets developed locally or by the uPortal community. UW–Madison has also provided bug fixes and significant development and leadership for uPortal 3.0, the next generation of uPortal.

"Working with an open-source project is invaluable experience for both myself as a developer and the University of Wisconsin as a whole," says Eric Dalquist, a portal development specialist at DoIT and the JA-SIG project lead for developing uPortal 3.0.

uPortal is focused on the needs of higher education institutions. It has been used for hundreds of active installations and is a noteworthy example of cooperation in higher education. Its system code is freely available to member universities, enabling institutions to explore the use of Web portals with little risk and then customize their portal as needed. Serving as a framework for portal development, uPortal provides for reusability of system components. It furnishes the common functionality that every portal needs and enables individual institutions to implement components that are important and specific to their campus.

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. Its current membership numbers more than 2,100 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 200 corporations, with 16,500 active members. EDUCAUSE has offices in Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C.