Minutes, ITANA Conference Call, October 15, 2009

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Attending
Jim Phelps, University of Wisconsin (chair)
Tom Barton, University of Chicago
Geoff Boushey University of California Berkeley
Rob Carter, Duke University
Tom Dopirak, Carnegie Mellon University
Scott Fullerton, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Keith Hazelton, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Paul Hobson, Cardiff University
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Oren Sreebny, University of Washington
Ann West, Internet2
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2 (scribe)

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Workflow Update

ITANA's workflow work is coming to a conclusion. Jim recapped what has been done, with Piet having added a lot of workflow information to the wiki, and a presentation from Kuali on their workflow stack. The question is whether there are other vendors in this space (enterprise workflow solutions) from whom presentations might be helpful.

Comments included:

  • It would be good to know the size of the enterprise workflow space. There is a sense that most campuses use the workflow within applications and it is all held together by email.
  • Cardiff is building out the IBM stack and is about a month from going live.
  • The Burton Group has been in touch with Jim, indicating that they are researching enterprise workflow.
  • The University of Wisconsin has Oracle's workflow product and Keith would be willing to make a presentation.

After a discussion it was decided to:

1 - Find universities that can talk about specific vendors
2 - Invite Burton to make a presentation to ITANA concerning their research
3 - Discuss the UK project with Paul Hobson
4 - Keith and Tom D. will discuss roadmapping enterprise workflow and Keith will make notes on the wiki.

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EDUCAUSE Annual Meeting

There will be an ITANA session at the EDUCAUSE annual meeting coming up the first week in November. The group brainstormed ideas for the agenda.

  • ITANA intro
  • Overview of what ITANA has been working on
  • At the meeting, ask participants what they are working on, in terms of architecture
  • Report out on workflow
  • Outline ITANA goals and point people at wiki
  • Provide specific information about what ITANA is doing/has done (data admin, workflow, enterprise architecture, and so forth)
  • Provide information about what ITANA plans for the future
  • Define enterprise architecture

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Enterprise Portals

Oren said that the University of Washington is discussing the replacement for an aging home-grown portal and have been looking at uPortal and Liferay. They have also had some discussions as to whether general portals are still viable.

One use of the portal is to provide people with one place to go for their applications. Short of that, portals are also used to aggregate application user interfaces.

Jim said that the next upgrade for the University of Wisconsin's uPortal deployment is a mobile interface. People who use their phone or Blackberry to access the portal and get to an application will be presented with a better-formatted way to do so.

Scott said that, in anticipation of an evaluation of the UWisc portal last spring, he expected most stakeholders to say the portals was not worth having - that there was some resentment to having to develop for the portal, as well as their own application interfaces. However, across the board he found that people feel a significant need for the portal.

Tom Barton reported that the University of Chicago went live with their new enterprise portal (uPortal) yesterday. The portal integrates efforts from many areas of the university, such as financial systems, the registrar, the undergraduate college and the medical school.

Oren said that portals very much link with workflow, primarily in their relationship with notifications and notification management. Jim suggested it might be an interesting area in which ITANA should weigh in, in terms of defining the issues and how portals relate to modular applications. UC Irvine, for example, has reported that they intend to use the portal as a place to aggregate all notifications. So there may be multiple workflow systems, but one place to go for all notifications.

There was also a discussion about video conferencing. Tom D discussed Tandberg video conferencing units in regards to a project underway by the Carnegie Mellon networking group. The system allows searching for units by location, organization, person, and other ways; leading him to believe there is a lot of data that needs to be provided and that should be kept in an enterprise directory.

Tom Barton said that ITU has addressed how to use an LDAP directory in its H.350 directive.

Next call: Thursday, October 29, 2009, 2 p.m. EDT

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