About uPortal

In order to remain competitive, institutions must continue to deliver innovative approaches to teaching and learning.  Limited resources and shrinking budgets are quickly putting proprietary software options out of reach.  This dilemma has caused institutions to come together and create open source solutions for higher education, such as JASIG's uPortal framework.

What is uPortal?

uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher education.  As a central framework in the online campus, uPortal provides a single point of access, robust groups and permissions, and personalization of content.  It is a collaborative development project, using Java, XML, JSP and XSLT, with the effort shared among several of the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JASIG) member institutions.

History of uPortal

In 2001, a group of 20 institutions, including Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Delaware, University of British Columbia, Cal Poly, Columbia, Holy Cross, Georgetown, and Boston College, recognized the need to protect the institutional image, to exploit the potential of the portal, and to promote the use of Java technology.  Under the sponsorship of Sun Microsystems, these institutions formed the Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JASIG).  Securing a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, volunteers from Interactive Business Solutions (a company subsequently acquired by Unicon, Inc.) and the participating institutions developed a free and open source portal focused on the use cases of higher education.  The uPortal project has enjoyed considerable success with over 600 production deployments, and remains the most widely used open source portal in higher education.

What is JASIG?

The Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JASIG) is a nonprofit, independent organization of IT professionals who share an interest in the use and advancement of open source software for higher education.  JASIG promotes the use of Java technologies and architectures within the higher education community and supports the development and adoption of low cost, flexible, open source solutions that adhere to best practices and open standards.  JASIG provides hosting and representation for several open source projects including uPortal and the Central Authentication Service (CAS).